Every stroke of the keys on a well-made keyboard should bring a unique joy: Each clack provides your ideal tactile feedback, and each key is styled to match your aesthetic. If you spend most of your day typing, coding, or gaming, a mechanical keyboard can be a comfortable, customizable upgrade over the shallow, drab keyboard that came with your computer.
After spending months testing the most promising mechanical keyboards, we
like the Varmilo VA87M for its excellent build quality and its compact,
minimalist design. It’s available with plenty of switch options and colorful
high-quality keycaps to match your preference, too.
The Varmilo VA87M and VA87M Mac are available with a variety
of Cherry switches; if you don’t already know what kind of switches you like,
we recommend Cherry MX Brown switches because they offer a satisfying tactile
bump without making too much noise for a shared space. Our pick comes with a
removable Mini-USB cable that’s easy to replace and a wire keycap puller for
replacing or cleaning keys. These Varmilo keyboards aren’t fully programmable,
but they have clearly labeled media keys, and you can customize a couple of
functions.
We recommend tenkeyless keyboards—that is, models without a
built-in number pad—because they’re more ergonomic and because most people
don’t use a number pad frequently enough to justify the desk space it occupies.
If you do need a number pad, you can get a separate numpad, such as the Leopold
FC210TP, which you can move out of the way when you’re not using it.
If the Varmilo VA87M is unavailable when you’re shopping, we
recommend the Leopold FC750R. It has equally excellent build quality, and its
minimalist tenkeyless design is similarly compact. It’s also available with all
the most popular switch types. Leopold offers a few different tasteful,
high-quality keycap sets, though it doesn’t provide as much variety as Varmilo
does and has no backlight options. Like the VA87M, the FC750R has a removable
Mini-USB cable and works on both Windows and Mac. But the FC750R’s media
controls aren’t labeled on the keycaps (or explained in the manual), so you’ll
have to memorize them.
f you do need a built-in number pad, the Leopold FC900R is
the best option. It’s nearly identical to our runner-up, the Leopold FC750R, as
it offers equally excellent build quality, it’s available with all the most
popular switch types, and you can choose from a few different PBT keycap sets.
Like the tenkeyless model, this keyboard has a removable Mini-USB cable and
works on both Windows and Mac, but—also like the tenkeyless model—it has no
labels on its media controls. (We don’t recommend the Varmilo VA108M, the
full-size version of our top pick, because its case is significantly different
and not as good as that of its tenkeyless sibling.)
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