The change to blank keyboard keycaps

For many years now I have been typing without actually looking at the keyboard, as I am sure most people are capable of doing. Recently I made the change to blank keyboard keycaps to see if it would really make much difference to me, and partially just for a bit of fun. In this post I’ll cover my experience since changing to blank keys.

keyboard

The mechanical keyboard I use is a Filco Majestouch 2 Ninja with cherry brown keys, I got it after previously using a Filco Majestouch which I really liked. The Ninja has the symbols on the side of the key as shown above.

I purchased some blank keys from Amazon for about $40 and then replaced all the letters to start with, I’ll probably progressively change the numbers/symbols over in the future as I have spare blank keys.

At first it felt strange but in no time I noticed that it really did not make any difference to my typing. That was until I had to enter in some long and complex passwords. Plenty of times during the day I need to type in random passwords that I’ve never seen before and I noticed that these seem to break my flow of typing, I’d have to slow down and think where each letter is. For example entering the password v2;%&#k~WqG^g"a after each number/symbol I’d have to start on the letters again and recall where each individual one is.

I quickly got used to this the more that I had to do it, but at the start it was a bit of a challenge and I got a fair few passwords wrong. The constant flow of typing however was easy as that didn’t involve randomly chopping and changing all over the place.

The best thing about this change is it never gets old when other people attempt to use my keyboard and aren’t able to work it out.


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  1. I’m not sure if there’s any truth to this, but I feel that a lot of what you experienced was due to memorization. It is easy to type plain words and sentences because we do it so often it’s engrained in our brains and the keystrokes come without thinking. But random characters are just that – they’re random. So we have to think about what we’re typing because it’s unnatural and we haven’t done it 1,000 times over.

  2. Hard to think I’ve been using these blank keys for over a year now :D don’t think I’ll be going back.

  3. I just wanted to add that I just went to clean the keyboard for the first time since this post, after putting all of the keys on and checking out my work I noticed that a bunch of them looked out of place and different sized.

    After some investigation, turns out there are different sized keys for each row, I had just assumed that all keys were created equally the same which is not the case! This post has further information on how it works if you have this issue: http://blog.bogosity.se/2010/09/12/reassembling-das-keyboard/

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