I have my first mechanical keyboard, it is the Atreus, by Keyboard.io, I’m very happy, but also frustrated, because it is too damn hard.

I always say I’m not a genius, it is very hard for me to learn and adapt, but after near a month of using it, I have some things to say about it, some of them are good, and some are bad.

Mechanical

It feels awesome, the sound is great, the feedback is also great. On the bad side, the lacking of the palm rest makes it uncomfortable if you don’t find anything to get there.

Small

It is great to have the mouse closer, and to think how to use the keys, but, I think the layout could be better, I miss the place of the tab and capslock keys, I feel that my little finger fall from the keyboard all the time, and there are some keys that are unreachable on the fourth row.

Programable

This was the worst part, because there are two ways of programming, and they are disconected, on one hand there is an GUI application very nice looking, but quite hard and slow to do some things, but as mentioned is it a GUI application that is mostly oriented to win-mac users, that cannot connect with anything else, so every missing feature is impossible to catch.

On the other hand, there is a library for the arduino there, but the code is a mess, I’m not sure why, but there are three layers of macros calling macros that makes impossible to understand what is happening under the hood. I would have prefered something with far less features but easy to understand, it is just the opposite of ruby or suckless.

Community

There are two communities working, on one hand there is a discourse site, that works like a forum, and there is also a discord chat. There are also github issues, but the code is too complex to make it useful to talk there. I hate discord, it is bloated and invasive, on the other hand, discourse get the least attention, so it is pretty abandoned. So, as far as got, I’m not too comfortable there.

Conclusion

I’m happy with it, but it is not what I’ve imagined, I thought it would be a hacker think, something linuxy, but it is more like an apple thing, for people with hats.