I'll be the first to tell you: I am not a keyboard aficionado. I know very little about them outside of generally how they work. For most of my adult life I've been more than satisfied with the stock Dell mechanical that I pulled out of a recycle bin for an employer somewhere around 15 years ago. It's got the media controls on it, a key next to the right-side alt for opening context menus (this is the same thing as a right-click in Windows) which I think is pretty neat and not many standard keyboards have.
Five years ago (or so) one of my coworkers gave me the quick rundown on mechanical keyboards and why they're better. I generally agreed that the clickety-clack is a pretty great sound. It reminds me of the sportswriters of old who pecked out elegant summaries of World Series excellence occurring decades before I was born. I wanted to be that cool even if what I was typing out probably wouldn't be read by any humans ever. So I asked for some advice and dropped about $100 on a Ducky.
It was cool. Kind of heavy (but not really), and boy did it deliver that smooth, intoxicating clickety-clack with every stroke. The sensitivity was something I had read about online and is a big deal to more people than I thought. I forgot what switches are in that thing but I remember agonizing over which set to choose when I was putting my order together. Whatever it is, I chose right because I've been using that keyboard ever since on my main desk even though the machine and operating system interpretting the keystrokes has changed several times since then.
About a year ago I caught wind of Electronic Materials Office somewhere online. Some fella across the pond had decided the world didn't have the right keyboard we all needed so he decided to make his own en masse and he was asking for pre-orders. Being the dumb sucker I am, I decided to send him about $400 fully believing I was going to get a badass little mechanical keyboard that would fit in my backpack.
Every month they sent an email update describing the current challenges of the great Altar I project and how they were fighting relentlessdly to overcome them. I found myself eagerly checking my inbox more frequently on the final days of each month hoping for the magic words to be somewhere in the body: "We are now shipping pre-orders."
At the end of May they said they would be shipping them in June and I would get an email when mine shipped. I waited patiently. I checked Twitter a few times and saw some other folks had already received theres in the second week of the month. The third week of the month came and I finally got my email. My unit would land on my porch in a few days.
Sure enough, right around lunch time today, the friendly DHL guy set the box down on my front porch.
I wipped that mf out of the box ready TO ROCK. I plugged it into my workstation (not my daily driver, the machine a company sent me to do things on in exchange for a salary. It's Windows :/) and started playing around with it. The rotary knob thingy instantly worked to adjust the device's volume. Neat.
But I forgot about two important things in my excitement. I have big hands (because I'm a big person). And I REALLY like having a full size keypad to the right side of the main typing area. Maybe it's a relic behavior imprinted on me from my college years working in call centers in between labor gigs, but I really use that part of the keyboard a lot. Like, I'm half confused when I'm just using a laptop when I need to type numbers because they're all the way up there and not just a slight lateral flinch away from my fingertips.
Any new thing takes some getting used to but this is a whole new ballgame. Also, the right-side shift key is half the size of the other one to make room for the full directional keyset. Those are nice and really great to have on a compact, wireless keyboard. But I can't remember the last time I actually used the shift key on the left-side of a keyboard. Maybe I never have. So I'm making tons of typos today. I've accurately hit the shift key like 10% of all the tries today when I haven't been looking right at it.
I finished writing the code for this site with this keyboard and I'm pretty sure it took three times as long as it should have because I couldn't stop fucking up with the shift key. It's all Node.js so lots of braces and semicolons (I know those aren't required so much anymore but I like them).
Then, when I was doing the normal things in bash on some servers, I kept fucking up the pipe character. But that's all not so bad. It's a new keyboard and it's the first day. I'll adjust.
The thing that REALLY frustrates me is the placement of the Bluetooth pairing button. It's on the right face of the keyboard's body. I often use my hands to shift the keyboard a bit right or left using the sides of it. Every time I've done this today, I've accidentally hit that button which disconnects it from my computer. Annoying as fuck. It's a bit of an unconscious habit that occurs any time I sit upright to start using the keyboard. Sort of like a quarterback slapping the pigskin right before he lets it fly. Or a pitcher torquing his glove ever so slightly before starting the windup on an off-speed pitch he doesn't execute for the four-seamer.
But overall, I think it's an excellent keyboard. I'll put my Ducky back in place on this desk later this weekend after I'm done acclimating to the Altar I. Because the real intent for this thing is to be my backpack keyboard. I went straight Macbook for laptops when Apple started making their own processors (because there's nothing even close). But the shit side of that coin is their peripherals. They're all dogshit. Apple couldn't make a keyboard that was pleasant to use if the world depended on it. Their idea of a nice keyboard is literally the epitome of the worst keyboard ever. I threw down $100 for a magic keyboard back in 2020 thinking it would be great with the Macbook. It's an awful, awful thing. Worst keyboard I've ever used. No question.
So the Altar I perfectly solves that problem. It's a nice, compact, mechanical keyboard that IS nice to use AND it fits perfectly in my backpack. I highly recommend it if you've got $400 to burn. If not, then go find a Dell stock keyboard from 2005 in someone else's bin like I did. No major computer manufacturer has made a better keyboard than that at scale ever and none probably ever will again. Lenovo ruined the legendary Thinkpad keyboard over a decade ago and that was the last truly great onboard laptop typing experience the world ever saw. Pretty much as long as I'm working on a machine provided by an employer in my own office, I'm going to be using that Dell SK-8135 on whatever is plugged in on the money-maker desk.
