Why a tactile keyboard?

If you've wandered into this community by accident, you may be wondering why people develop such an attachment to these archaic-seeming mechanical-switch devices. What makes them better than a modern soft-touch keyboard?

The fundamental reason is ergonomic. Mechanical keyboards (and especially buckling-spring keyboards) provide clear tactile feedback that a keypress has taken place a handful of milliseconds before the key would actually bottom out.  This feedback makes it possible for the typist to stop pushing before the key bottoms out, reducing total effort by up to a (measured) factor of two.

The lowered effort substantially reduces the risk of RSI, and there field evidence that people with RSI may achieve reduction in symptoms or even complete remission of RSI by using tactile-feedback devices.

Even mechanical-keyboard fans without RSI find we can type faster and more accurately on tactile devices than on dome-switch keyboards  that don't supply anything but slight uniform resistance or a meaningless click before they bottom  out. 

There's a little more to it than that.  Like tribes that have formed around other classic designs, the mechanical keyboard has become a marker for traditions and attitudes that evolved along with it, including a certain reverence for timeless excellence in engineering, a willingness to pay more for quality, and a disdain for competing designs that, while putatively more 'modern', are felt to be cheap and junky and ephemeral by comparison.

The archetype of the tactile keyboard, the Model M, is both tactile and clicky; that is, it gives not just touch feedback but an audible keypress sound as well.

The model M is  particularly favored by old-school computer hackers (and by people who want to be like them) as a timeless classic of design, and a vast improvement over most of its successors. A close parallel to this community of feeling elsewhere is the cult of the 1911-pattern .45ACP among pistol shooters.

Beware, though, of some tradeoffs.  Tactile keyboards are relatively expensive to manufacture, rugged, and last a long time (it is not all that unusual to see 30-year-old model Ms still in use, having outlasted generations of computers).  Because of this and they fact that they're a minority preference, making a profit on them is difficult. Vendors tend to be boutique operations with very little engineering budget; many designs are long in the tooth and may require adaptors and a bit of troubleshooting to talk to modern hardware.  Genuinely newer designs are made only in small runs and thus sell at boutique prices.

Despite these inconveniences, most tactile-keyboard fans will never willingly use anything else.

(I wrote this so I could add it to the community sidebar links.)