Keychron Q3 Max

This year I decided to treat myself with a new keyboard, and I’ve chosen the Keychron Q3 Max; this post is a short summary of my impressions after a few weeks of use.

To begin with, the mandatory TL;DR: I love it. There is no way to put it; this is by far the best keyboard I have ever owned, and I cannot believe I didn’t get one earlier. Seriously good. Of course I got mine with the mandatory US (ANSI) layout, which you can see in the picture below.

There are several things that I found outstanding in this keyboard. Foremost, the packaging is (let’s be honest) sublime. Outside the Apple galaxy, where things are always beautifully packaged, few manufacturers try to stand out in packaging; Keychron is the exception, clearly.

Then the accessories: it comes bundled with all sorts of tools and with keycaps replacing the dreaded “Windows” key, which faithful readers know I loathe and despise vehemently. Inside a little bag there’s a classic macOS “Command” key and a much more appropriate “Alt” key, which, as you can see in the picture, is the one I ended up installing.

Then there’s the configuration. To change various settings on your keyboard, you can use the Keychron Launcher, which, surprisingly enough, is a web application. At the time of this writing, it is only available on Chrome (or Chromium, as is my case) or other browsers using the same engine (Opera and Edge, most notably). Although apparently Firefox will soon gain access to the coveted Web Serial API, which would expand the availability of this application to our beloved browser as well. Crossing fingers.

Then comes the keyboard itself; I’ve chosen a unit with brown switches, and I have to say, I love it. It has the tactile feedback of the blue switches I already knew (my good old Das Keyboard 4 Ultimate I bought in 2015 had blue switches), but without the insane level of noise. Yes, maybe I’m getting old, and I need a bit quieter environment around me. Who knows?

Also: it is heavy! Very dense, almost as heavy as my old Das Keyboard but with a smaller size, and the construction quality is seriously good.

Some key combinations that I had to look for in the documentation, leaving them here for future reference:

• Fn + B to see the battery level (as a very nice LED animation below the number row; I love those kinds of small details)
• Fn + W to increase the brightness of the LEDs and Fn + S to bring it down. Although there are also dedicated function keys for that (Fn + F6 and Fn + F5, respectively).

I love the fact that this keyboard comes with arrow + utility keys (Ins, Del, Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down) located in the standard location of most keyboards, without fancy Fn + combinations to make them work properly (my previous keyboard before the Keychron was a Logitech MX Keys Mini… and it was a bit too minimalist for my taste). It also has a very handy volume knob next to the F12 key, and did I mention that all keys are completely programmable through the Launcher application?

As for the LEDs beneath the keys, I opted for the “heatmap” setting, where the most used keys are the ones getting the “hotter” colors. I found that quite cool, and it’s a funny way to discover my typing patterns.

Now for the less fun part: I tried accessing the Keychron Launcher app from two different laptops, both running Fedora 43, and in the first (my Lenovo laptop provided by Red Hat), it worked out of the box; however, on my personal one (a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10), I could not make it recognize my device, and I was getting an error message looking like this:

A little bit of Google-fu later, I found the solution in a GitHub Gist showing a short Bash script that gets the trick done. Run the script as sudo, et voilà! My keyboard was properly recognized by the system.

So, conclusion: I love this keyboard; it is very comfortable, I can type at full speed, and I can write more and more text for this blog and my magazine every day. Highly recommended!