"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."
"These keys have wire assemblies underneath called stabilizers, which help them go up and down when the switch does. A cheap stabilizer will do this, but it won't necessarily do it well. Stabilizers can be loud and move unevenly, or a wire can even pop out and really ruin your day. But what's good? A stabilizer is there to, well, stabilize, and that's all it should do."
Mechanical keyboard stabilizers are wire assemblies under longer keys (Space, Enter, Shift, Backspace, and some numpad keys) that help those keys move evenly with the switch. Poor stabilizers introduce noise, uneven movement, friction, or even wire detachment, degrading typing feel and sound. Stabilizers should simply facilitate smooth up-and-down motion without adding artifacts. Most stabilizers trace back to Cherry Inc. designs but have evolved with community-driven tweaks and innovations. Stabilizers must meet physical mounting and keycap compatibility measurements for PCBs. A growing ecosystem of modified and higher-quality stabilizers exists to improve typing experience.
Read at Ars Technica
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