How to Shop for a Mechanical Keyboard (2025): Switches, Materials, and Layouts Explained

Most keyboards will come with inexpensive ABS keycaps that use a thin, cheap, inconsistent plastic. These keycaps aren’t terrible, but they’re not perfect. They look worse and out of shape than the nicer set and are more likely to crack or break over time.

PBT keycaps typically create a lower-pitched sound when typing, and are usually made of thicker plastic than available ABS keycaps. They are almost always dyed, a process in which the dye is absorbed into the plastic using heat, although some manufacturers such as PBTFans have begun producing double-shot PBT keycaps, where the text on the keycaps is made of the second plastic and will never wear off. Dye sublimation is almost as durable as double shot, and although it is theoretically possible for dye keycaps to fade or wear out, this will likely never happen in your lifetime.

Manufacturers like GMK make thick ABS keycaps using high-quality plastic, which many enthusiasts prefer over PBT. The main advantage of the premium ABS system is that the keycaps can easily be double-captured. ABS plastic can have brighter colors than is possible with PBT, but it will also start to shine over time – something that rarely happens with PBT keycaps.

While dye sublimation and duplex keycaps are the most popular, there are quite a few other ways to get text on the key. Some keycaps, whether ABS or PBT, will use UV printing directly on top of the keycaps rather than imprinting the legends into the plastic of the keycaps. Some kits, such as GMK Cyrillic, include duplex and UV printing. While UV printed keycaps are the easiest to manufacture, they also last the shortest, as the text is placed directly on top of the plastic rather than embedded in it.

Along with plastic keycaps, there has been a recent influx of metal and ceramic keycaps. While these can be better to write on, they are more expensive. The added weight of these heavier materials may cause your keys to require less force to press down (or, for some very light keys, the weight of the full metal space bar may be too heavy for the key to hold up). In my experience, ceramic keycaps are also at a higher risk of breaking, although Cerakeys has made improvements to their designs to reduce this from happening.

Choose your keyboard layout

The most obvious aspect of any keyboard is its layout, which describes how many keys are on the keyboard and how those keys are organized. When deciding which layout you want, you’ll need to make trade-offs between keyboard size and ease of use. Because a smaller keyboard removes more keys and moves them to a secondary function layer, you’ll end up committing more of the keyboard layout to memory, but it also means you’ll have to move your hands less when typing, which can be beneficial for reducing wrist strain and increasing efficiency.