by The Keychron K4 maybe look like amazing keyboard but, being amazing at being productive on it is another story.
Looking at the Keychron K4 it stands out from the rest of the keyboards available on the market. With its minimal key spacing compact designed, and its gray color scheme. It is in my opinion one of the best looking keyboards I ever seen. And does this while not taking much space, I was sold.
The Key feel of this keyboard i would say is great, maybe one of the better mechanical keyboards I used. while maybe not as good as my IBM model m keyboard(what keyboard is? haha) the Gateron blue switch’s on this keyboard are great, and are much better feeling then other keyboards I had used until now.
The Keychron k4 is also a wireless Bluetooth and has wire functionally too. You can use it as a wireless keyboard for a phone or laptop, or you can be just like me and use a wire not worry about changing it! Haha
This keyboard came with extra key caps for mac computers and has a mac mode for compatibly. While i didn’t use this mode I assume it works.
The Keyboard also futures RGB lighting, with many modes to play with. Thought it doesn’t have the same functionally as many other brand keyboards have, such as having the ability to have custom RGB layouts for specific programs.
While i have a great time with this keyboard and looks great on my desk unfortunately, it just falls short in the things that are important. One is the placement of the arrow keys. The compact design compress the keys together making hitting the wrong key verily easily to do. which means i have to correct a lot which wastes my time. Another issue is that this keyboard is thick, and has too much height. Without some kind of palm rest, using this keyboard for long periods of time can be a real pain. The frame of the keyboard is solid, though its still made of plastic.
But one of my biggest gripes was the function keys, which i don’t know why but they set them media key mode by default! While this might make a lot of sense for say a normal user who just watches videos and listens to music all day. With a keyboard selling for more then $70 I really don’t see thoses kind of users buying this kind of keyboard! There is a key combination to switch between modes, but i find out it doesn’t really works with linux! And as a linux user this is a problem. I did found a solution thanks to a reddit unofficial support page for the product. But this keyboard was starting to be more of a pain then its worth it to me. If your a linux user, just avoid this keyboard its not wroth it.
From a 1 to 10 i give this keyboard 6. Great feeling keys, I like the compact design, and the wire/wireless modes. But with the negatives I can’t really recommend this keyboard for productive users. Unless you really like how it looks and don’t mind if your wrist’s hurt, And dealing with the function key issues. I say avoid this keyboard, there’s lots of good options out there. its just too bad, it is really a nice looking keyboard.
