While most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the keys they tap all day, mechanical keyboard enthusiasts certainly do. As interest in DIY keyboards expands, there are plenty of things to obsess over, such as keycap sets, layout, knobs, and switches. But you have to get deep into the hobby before you realize there’s something more important than all that: the stabilizers.
Even if you have the fanciest switches and a monolithic aluminum case, bad stabilizers can make a keyboard feel and sound like garbage. Luckily, there’s a growing ecosystem of weirdly fancy stabilizers that can upgrade your typing experience, packing an impressive amount of innovation into a few tiny bits of plastic and metal.
ending:
Still, a good-quality set of stabilizers, properly installed and lubricated, is probably the best upgrade you can make to a mechanical keyboard in spite of tariffs. The duty paid on a $20–30 item won’t break the bank, and it really will make your keyboard better.
As someone who exclusively used ortholinear split keyboards with no keys larger than 1.25, I have no use for stabilizers.
Why have anything larger than 1?
It’s most likely for the thumbs, which are not quite as agile as other fingers and hit keys at a different angle. Even then, the 1.25 is probably more “nice” than “necessary.”
I like keyboards without stabs.
The problem is that stabilizers tend to be a huge commitment unless maybe you have a hot swap board.
The ones I have are terrible-- loose fit in the caps-- but I’d have to desolder 7 switches and risk PCB damage to change them.
Yup. I just got a “modern vintage” industrial board that has similarly iffy stabs and even nonstandard stab spacing for the spacebar, and while I could probably dremel out the plate, I’d have to disassemble the board again and desolder the switch, then put it all back together, and THAT’S for a single plate-mount. So, nope, it keeps its original caps and stabs until something is just too perfect.
I don’t care for how this article assumes I know nothing about stabilizers; something I know a great deal about. And there was only one brand it mentioned that I haven’t heard of, but it was worth reading the article just for that, since they look promising.
