About to say the same thing! I'm sure there are some people who use a mechnical keyboard to "show off", but for me (and I assume the vast majority) the noise you endure is pollution while I enjoy the tactile & audio dopamine hit.
I have these, for an office. Yes they are silent if you slowly push and release a key, but thumping away at 50-60 wpm still makes a huge amount of noise, even with o-rings installed (although a lot quieter than blue switches which I used to have).
I have topre switches, so a bit different experience, but a friend of mine had "shown off" that indeed, you can type silently on them. It's the art of not bottoming out which is something like 90% of the noise.
There are some silent, tactile switches, but I think they're a bit more obscure.
I made my ergonomic, split keyboards from a kit[1], and chose Aliaz Silent switches [2]. It's around the same noisiness as everyone else's keyboard (Apple, cheap Dell one etc).
(There are almost certainly other options — the choice was a bit overwhelming when I decided to buy a DIY keyboard — but I'm not in the hobby of collecting many different keyboards. Various Reddit groups can advise.)
Linear switches are basically already silent compared to tactile or clicky switches. If Cherry starts making quiet blues or clears I'll start getting excited.
Honestly the biggest source of noise for basically all mechanical keys except buckling spring or cherry-blue style keys is the noise of the keycap or key stem hitting the bottom and subsequently the top of travel. Half of that is fixable with o-rings but that still leaves the noise at the top of travel which doesn't currently have any solutions as far as I know.
Install a triggered directed boombox emitting a loud 'BANG' on registering that spacebar sound. Make it trigger only 35% of the time and with a variable 0-5 sec delay. I bet he stops using that spacebar by the end of the first day.
I'm going to make the guess that you meant "True" in the "no true scotsman" way of passing off outsiders.
Personally I find this kind dismissive commentary a little bit aggravating.
In my mind you're a "true" geek if you unashamedly enjoy the technicalities of something.
from Dungeons and Dragons to Train design.
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The parent is also a little distasteful. If you don't like the noise of a mechanical keyboard consult your manager; the issue is with poor sound isolation not with mechanical keyboards. Typewriters were a thing for many decades and people managed.
Keyboards might be a preference but the fact is that we're all human and we have our "sound vices"; whether it be being too loud when chewing or yelling into a mic mere inches away from your face all the way to nervously clicking your tongue when lost in thought.
Don't excuse those who have designed offices to be very poor w.r.t. sound isolation by blaming those who dare make noise.
> Typewriters were a thing for many decades and people managed.
Perhaps you weren't there. When typewriters were commonly used they were typically in the typing pool or in the secretary's own office and the noise didn't impinge on the rest of us. Of course it was different in offices where the principal activity was typing such as newspapers.
From '78 to '82 I worked as an electronics engineer in an open plan office that was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. None of us typed, instead we scrawled our documentation longhand and the department secretary typed it on an IBM Selectric in her own office next to the department manager's office. It sounds inefficient but in fact was not because revising documents was so time consuming that more effort went into keeping things simple and as far as practicable right first time.
If someone had made a lot of noise it would have been pointless complaining about the design of the office, the only practical remedy would be for them to stop being noisy.
Did you really turn that offhand comment into a rant about geek gatekeeping?
I started working in an era when electric typewriters were still common. They certainly were not used in the common areas in any place I worked because of the noise.
Just to be clear, if you make a ton of noise in a common environment it’s your job to find a way to reduce your impact. If we have to go to the manager to make you change your ways ... well that answers the AITA.
Two of my work places did. Others just had a layout where the people who typed were kept away from other employees, like small set of typing cubicles in the open area surrounded by offices or cubicles at the far end of the open area with an open space between typists and others.
One of my workplaces was a mainframe shop, some of the older devs still programmed their cobol/fortran iv code on sheets and took it to the data entry pool in another wing for input.
I wouldn't call them distasteful, just low-effort humorous posts.
I recall a story about a developer who brought his mechanical keyboard to a job interview, to check if it is acceptable to other people in the office. That's quite considerable gesture.
Come on, relax a bit! A little bit of humor is important, especially in these times. It's all for fun, none of the parents really meant being dismissive etc. We all need to cheer up a bit otherwise we'll get crazy!
Geek is someone that has a special interest that goes up and beyond what is usual [1]. So a tree geek is someone that knows a lot about trees. Or there was a typo that was supposed to be "true" but I'm sure you know this already :-)
I had a coworker who insisted on mechanical keyboards and dvorak because it's more efficient (according to him). This guy was the most unproductive programmer I've ever known, you'd hardly hear his keyboard anyway.
