What do you do when you don’t want your typing to be so loud and distracting or disrespectful to those around you? Start with silenced switches of course.
I finally swapped out my Gateron Yellow switches for a set of Boba Gum switches of the 68g variety and am really happy with them.
Using them in a Preonic with an aluminum plate and case with and more than cheap shelf liner installed for sound dampening, they are amazingly quiet. They’re not completely silent obviously but my typing is no longer bothering my wife and I can work late into the night without waking her or the rest of the family.
Now I can even type away without worrying about people complaining about the noise while I’m on a phone call.
There are plenty of silent switch options these days but I highly recommend these Boba Gum switches. I do have very limited experience with silenced switches so don’t take my word for it–always do your research first and ultimately you’ll want to try and type on a set of switches for a while before you can decide whether or not they are ‘quiet’ enough for your needs.
Here are some decent affordable silent switch options:
- Haimu x Geon Silent Yellow (tactile)
- Haimu Silent Red (linear); also consider the Haimu Whisper or Haimu Heartbeats which are the same switches with different naming/color
- Outemu Silent Peach (linears).
- Outemu Silent Cream Yellows (silent tactile)
For reference, I am using 68g Boba Gum linear switches with the pink tops on a V3 Preonic keyboard with an aluminum case and aluminum plate.
My only other experience with silent switches are my MiniVan with 78g Zilent tactiles. That ones’ a little louder than I’d like since it’s a plateless build with a plastic case and just one layer of shelf liner installed to keep its weight down since it was my travel keyboard for a while. I’m now using a Corne.
If you’ve never tried silenced switches you should know that some can feel “mushy” to type on since part of the mechanism used to silence them has to do with how you bottom out the switch internals.
Not all silenced switches feel this way but again, make sure you do your research. There are other considerations as well like feel, actuation point and travel.
Switches like the Outemu Silent Peach for example, have a very short travel before actuation so if you’re a heavy-handed typist it might not work well for you.