The picture above is of the A4Tech KBS-20MU. For many, many years it was my favorite keyboard. It wasn't mechanical, it didn't have LEDs (tried modding them into one of them, didn't fit), but it was amazing. For a plunger based keyboard, it had superb travel and tactile feel, especially since I was coming out of using a low profile one. More important than that, it had a dial. Just look at it, so smooth, so sweet. It didn't come with any fiddly software, being PS/2, so I couldn't rebind the dial to do fiddly things in other programs, but it made changing the volume a great experience. It also came with dedicated office keys, that went mostly unused. And the lock indicators were centralized, so you could always see them. Oh, and two very important things. It had audio jacks on the side and a USB port on the other one.
The first one I had broke in about a year, I mean, it did cost 9 dollars, I didn't expect it to be amazingly durable. But the last one has lasted for 5 years. 5 years of hard typing of tens of thousands of words a day. In the end, I did have to look for a replacement, and so I stepped into the land of mechanical keyboards, and came to the conclusion that although some of the switches are silky smooth and give a great feedback, in terms of functionality they are satan's anus.
Now, what I mean by that is that for the price they have, they could afford to add some of the features include in a 9 dollar keyboard. I know that the switches are expensive and great for typing (unless they're Khail Brown switches, they can go to hell), but I need more features. MORE!!! And the majority of mechanical keyboards I see on the market just don't offer that. The bit that annoys me most is that keyboard manufacturers don't even offer dedicated volume controls or dedicated media keys, instead they rely on FN combos, usually placed in such a way that you can't even change the volume with one hand. Do you have any clue how annoying that is? I do. I've been doing it for a year and it's still driving me mad. And these keyboards don't even come with extra USB ports, or audio ports, or macro keys. The majority of them look like this.
And I mean, they all literally look like that, apart from the logo being that of a different brand. That's because they technically are all made by the same factory, and the "manufacturers" just order them in bulk and stamp a logo on them. They're produced for very, very little money, and often sold at a much, much to high a price. Not all of them, I've seen some that are at least honest and really cheap, they even have interchangeable FN and Windows keys so you can at least change volume with one hand. But compared to a 9 dollar keyboard made a decade ago, in terms of features they suck.
I know that a perfect keyboard may be a different thing for each and every person, but for me, it would be one that has this kind of build:
This is the Das Keyboard 4. It's got the dial, it's got the volume controls, it's even got two USB ports on the back. What it could use would be an audio jack, but above that, it would be even better with macro keys that I can use for various other things. A couple of them on the side, a dedicate wrist rest and preferably clicky switches. Of course, that was before Microsoft announced that dial thing, and Logitech basically made a keyboard that has one. But I don't want to lose volume functionality while using the dial, so why not two dials? One on each side, so that I can scrub through a timeline with one, change volume with the other one, maybe actually have the second dial mapable to something other than volume so that I can zoom and scrub at the same time, and mash macros, live the dream, instead of being stuck in a Khail Brown switch nightmare. The problem with such a keyboard is two fold. No one makes one, and if they did it would cost an arm and a leg, because there's no standard mold for it. There's no factory in China churning them out by the millions, it would need a custom casing, custom circuitry to handle both dials.
So, basically what I'm saying is that I need this:
It would be great for working with video/image editing software, it would be great for games, depending on what switches you'd have in it, it would have customizabile RGB lighting and it would be huge (palmrest not pictured because I forgot to add it). Hmm, now that I think about it, maybe I could add a phone dock in the middle, since there would be a lot of wasted space. If you ever see something like that on the market, let me know... heck, if this Steemit thing works out great, I may try and fund it.