Hello /tech/. Recently my keyboard broke, the "6yhn" column stopped responding one key at a time, so I'm looking for a new keyboard. So far I had been using the Apple aluminium keyboard, which is a flat rubber-dome keyboard, similar to a notebook keyboard, and I really liked how little I had to press the keys and how the keys were not much higher than the desk.
Right now I'm using an el-cheapo fat keyboard which feel horrible, it so bulky that I had to raise my chair up, but how my wrists have to hover above the desk. The keys have to be pressed all the way down and they have terrible travel. It's not bad when hitting the keys straight up like on the home row, but for keys I need to reach and hit them at an angle it feels like the keys need to get unstuck first. It's a pain to type for any expanded period of time.
I was considering buying the Apple keyboard again, but then I found out that Apple has discontinued my model and replaced it with something they call the "Magic Keyboard" which they now charge 150$ for. At that price I would expect the keyboard to be actually magical, fuck this shit. Even worse, now the price for used Apple keyboards has jumped up to over 50$, and for that money I could have bought a new and sealed one back in the day. I'm not buying any of that, I'm not that much of a dick sucker.
So I figured "fuck it", and I'm ready to give something new a try. What is the deal with mechanical keyboards, are they just a meme or is there really something to them? I never tried one, I don't even know what the difference is. I am concerned about the height, all the mechanical keyboards I have seen are fat bulky ones like pic related.
What I expect from a keyboard is primarily to be good for a lot of typing. I'm using (Neo)vim and currently I have a thesis to write, so this is pretty much the worst time for a keyboard to break. I don't care about all that gamer shit with blinking LEDs and I can touch-type, so no need for glow-in-the-dark keycaps (I never look at my keyboard, so the caps might as well be blank). I also don't need media keys like "play" or "pause", but I do need keys for for volume, brightness and for ejecting discs. It would not be a deal-breaker not to have those, but it would be a deal-maker to have them. And ideally there would be a USB-hub in the keyboard as well. I have no idea why this hasn't caught on outside the Apple world; do people enjoy crawling under the desk to plug in their mouse or a USB stick? As my OS I use macOS and GNU/Linux, and I'm going to stick to this combination for a while before I can switch to GNU/Linux completely.