Keychron K2 HE Hall Effect Gaming Keyboard For Writing and Coding

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This is not a long-term review. I decided I should shop for a new keyboard last night, I ordered the Keychron K2 HE this morning, and it will arrive tomorrow morning. I will have had the keyboard on my desk for a week by the time I finish writing this blog, so I will definitely be able to tell you if I am happy with my purchase, but this is mostly going to be about WHY I chose the Keychron K2 HE.

I wound up paying $10 extra for the special edition with the wood accents. I’m not sure how necessary that was.

Keychron K2 HE at my desk

I have been using a $30 75% keyboard with knockoff Cherry MX Blue switches since 2019. I bought it on a whim. I saw a deal, I posted it to Butter, What?!, and I thought it might be fun to free up the real state on my desk between the enter key and my mouse. That was a fantastic decision, and it has been a surprisingly delightful keyboard.

I am a huge fan of the IBM Model M keyboard, so the blue switches feel light and uncomfortably crunchy to my fingers. I have been thinking for a long time that a switch upgrade would be fun. I am sure there is a smoother yet tactile switch with a much heavier actuation force available now, but there are something like 100 different Cherry-compatible switches to choose from. Making that choice seemed like a lot of work, so I kept putting it off.

The 16-gram gaming mouse that I’ve been using for the last six months is one of the lightest and lowest latency gaming mice anywhere in the world. Doesn’t it seem like a bummer to pair such an impressive mouse with a cheap old keyboard?

Why the Keychron K2 HE?!

I have been fascinated by the idea of these new hall-effect switches for quite a while now. You can set the actuation height in software, so you can have ridiculously responsive key presses while gaming.

They also allow for some interesting magic when pressing and releasing buttons: a key can be counted as released when you begin lifting your finger, while immediately reactivating another key that you were already holding down. You don’t have to lift above the actuation point. This is very similar to how movement binds in Team Fortress 2 are already done, but apparently this may trigger anticheat mechanisms in some multiplayer games!

This is all neat, but I was hoping that my next keyboard would be running open-source firmware like QMK or VIA. Last time I looked, all the hall-effect keyboards were proprietary.

I should have been paying more attention, because the Keychron K2 HE has been out for more than half a year, and it runs on QMK!

I am going to be honest with you, since I always do my best to stay honest here! Most of the hall-effect features seem like gimmicks. I’m not sure how much of a difference setting actuation height will make to responsiveness, and I half expect the feature where you can assign four actions to different depths on a single key to be too cumbersome to configure separately for each game.

That said, I am excited about having a chance to try them out. I will report back in a few months with details on how I manage to make use of that. I started my first game of Cyberpunk 2077 last week, and everyone tells me that I will hate driving with the keyboard. Maybe I will be able to configure analog steering!

Why a 75% keyboard layout?

I don’t need a number pad. I’m not an accountant working in the nineties. I don’t key in digits from receipts and purchase order printouts all day long. If you ARE keying in hundreds or thousands of digits all day long in 2025, why isn’t the machine somehow scanning those digits for you? The longest sequence of numbers I type is an occasional 6-digit 2FA code, and it is faster to type a year like 2025 without moving a hand all the way to a number pad.

The horizontal space on my desk between my fingers and my mouse is valuable. It is easier to keep things centered on the monitor if I don’t have to reach an extra six inches to get to the mouse, and it is nice to not have to reach that extra six inches over and over throughout the day.

A lot of people enjoy 60% keyboards, but I don’t find the space on my desk between my fingers and my monitor to be terribly valuable. You could fill that space with 100 extra keys, and the worst that would happen is that I’d ignore them. I will never wish I could put something in their place.

I tend to make use of function keys for one-handed operations. Emacs defaults to using F3 through F5 for recording, stopping, and replaying macros. I often click the next place I want to repeat a macro, so running the macro with one finger helps. I have F9 through F12 with modifier keys bound to shortcuts that adjust my display output between combinations of my primary monitor and my office television.

Now that I am dropping back to a single macropad, I might move some of my office video lighting controls to other combinations of function keys. The function keys are like a free macro pad in an unobtrusive spot, and I wouldn’t complain if I had an addition row of them!

Why use a gaming keyboard when I spend more time working than playing?

In a perfect world, the IBM Model M in my closet would appear on my desk when I am writing a blog or chatting in Discord, and a fancy hall-effect keyboard would magically take its place when I fire up a first-person shooter. I do swap my mouse when playing games that require fast aim, but I’m not going to attempt to play musical chairs with two heavy wired keyboards. I’m also not going to move to a separate desk, computer, monitor, and keyboard to play games. I toggle back and forth fairly often!

I can write a blog post using the crummiest laptop keyboard, but I will play Team Fortress 2 better with an appropriate tools, and I will also have more fun.

The linear hall-effect keys feel way different than blue switches!

I have been typing on this keyboard for three days. The first thing I did was switch to the preconfigured gaming profile, and I lowered the actuation distance for every key from 2 mm to 0.5 mm.

At that distance, it only takes letting the weight of one of your fingers rest on a key to see a letter appear on your screen. It happens just as the spring starts to provide proper resistance your pressure. I wound up setting the spacebar’s engagement height to the default of 2 mm because I was occasionally typing dozens of spaces while just resting my thumb on the keyboard!

Keychron K2 HE at my desk

I expected that I’d be toggling back to the 2-mm default profile when not gaming, but I have only been use the gaming profile with the short-throw switches. It isn’t causing me much trouble. I’m not typing extra random characters. The aggressive gaming switches still type like a normal keyboard for me.

I have noticed that I have a peculiar habit. When my thoughts slow down and my fingers catch up to the words, I might pause with my fingers somewhere besides the home row. I have seen a few accidental t characters pop up while waiting to think up the next word. It is always a t. I’m not sure why that is, but I seem to have already broken the habit.

I am weirded out by the creamier sound of this keyboard. The crunchiness of my old blue switches didn’t match the clackiness of my old IBM Model M, but those keyboards felt and sounded more alike than the Keychron K2’s linear Nebula switches compare to the blues. I hear this strange noise when my fingers hit the keys, and I feel like I am in the wrong office!

What about gaming, Pat?!

I don’t really know yet. I’ve only had the keyboard for a little over 24 hours. I feel like the part of my gaming experience where the rapid response of the quick-actuating hall-effect switches would help me the most would be when playing Team Fortress 2. I don’t have any plans to play in the near future, because playing an lightly competitive multiplayer game is tiring and draining. I usually have a few months in a row where I enjoy that, but then I wind up taking a break.

I have been playing through Sniper Elite: Resistance again this week. I enjoy this series of games. They reward my quick aim time and accuracy, but they don’t require me to be constantly aiming and shooting. I get to spend time slowly wandering around, positioning myself, and making sure a big group of bad guys doesn’t spot me.

The game is mostly relaxing with regular bursts of fun. It is also never going to make use of faster keyboard switches. I’m sure I’ll be excited to play some adrenaline-fueled games like Trepang2 or RoboQuest soon enough.

A keyboard that works as an analog gamepad?!

The third default profile is set up for gaming. It remaps the WASD cluster as the left analog stick. If you partially engage the W key, your guy will slowly walk forward. Push it all the way down, and he’ll walk at full speed. Isn’t that weird?!

I am curious about how this works out, because I recently started my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077. I prefer aiming with a mouse, but everyone tells me that I am going to hate driving with the keyboard. It sounds like the Keychron K2 HE might help me make the bad keyboard driving controls less bad. I’m not sure how well this works in practice, but I am excited about giving it a try!

But Pat! I don’t want to spend $140 on a keyboard!

Depending on which part of the Keychron K2 HE you value, there seem to be two really good options at around half the price. Keep in mind that I haven’t used either of these alternative keyboards. A keyboard is a personal and opinionated choice. It might be a good idea to shop somewhere with a liberal return policy!

You can skip the hall-effect switches and opt to go with the Keychron K2 Max for $115. I believe that replacing the hall-effect switches with red switches is the only difference between the K2 Max and K2 HE.

You can downgrade to lesser sound damping material with the Keychron K2 Pro and save another $10. You could also drop back to the base model Keychron K2 which has very little acoustic material to bring the price down to $80. Any of these keyboards would be a good option for office work, and would still be a fine gaming keyboards. Every Keychron K2 trim level supports the open-source QMK firmware.

If the hall-effect switches and rapid-trigger effect are what you’re excited about, I was also eyeing up the Yunzii RT75, which seems to go on sale regularly for $72. The RT75 does not run open-source firmware. Yunzii’s web configurator seems to have a feature set comparable to the Keychron K2 HE.

The Yunzii RT75 is in a fully plastic case, and it doesn’t have comparable acoustic foam to any keyboard in the Keychron K2 lineup. It comes with a different set of tradeoffs, but I looked up how the Yunzii sounds, and I don’t think it sounds bad at all!

Buy vs. build

I am going to tell you right now that I have a lot of ideas about what would make for my ideal keyboard. I want a split keyboard, with bonus points for using a 3D cup shape. I want more keys that my thumbs can reach so I can rely less on my pinkies. I would enjoy an extra column of keys that my pinky could reach while using the WASD cluster while gaming.

I can’t get every feature I want without compromise. A split keyboard is going to end at G, but sometimes I DO reach for the Y and 7 keys while gaming, and they’d be a mile away on the wrong half.

A cupped ergonomic keyboard wouldn’t let me move my fingers over to WASD while gaming, which means I’d have to rely on layers to make games work. Then I’d have to make sure I switch layers if I use text chat or switch to my Discord window. Maybe I could automate that with QMK, but that’s even more work!

3D printing an ergonomic shell and manually soldering 80 switches isn’t a daunting task, but I am doubtful that one could design their own three-dimensional QMK or VIA keyboard with hall-effect switches today. I don’t know if this Keychron K2 HE sounds creamy or thocky, but I don’t believe that I couldn’t make my own keyboard sound like this no matter how many heavy layers I cut out of aluminum on my CNC machine.

I have enough desk space in here that I could have a station dedicated to gaming, but it doesn’t make any financial sense. My gaming GPU makes DaVinci Resolve run faster. An overpowered CPU that I might have for compiling or rendering can still be utilized for gaming.

All these related tasks work better if I invest all the money into a single build, so I need one keyboard that works well enough for everything.

Conclusion

We know this isn’t a conclusion. I haven’t even had the Keychron K2 HE in my hands for an entire week, and I haven’t even played any games where keyboard latency will have any impact. I haven’t even gotten to test out the Dynamic Keystrokes. My boring idea is to move the harder to reach weapon-switch binds from 4 through 6 down to short presses of 1 through 3, but that is a heck of a minor upgrade from a keyboard that cost five times as much the one it replaced.

I am confident that I have chosen well. Spending $140 on a piece of hardware that I will push thousands of words through every single day is a bargain. I’ll be excited if it manages to improve my gaming experience by even 5%. I am even more excited about messing around with an extremely custom QMK build at some point in the future.

I want to hear what you think! Did I make a good choice with the Keychron K2 HE? Should I have chosen something else? Would I have been better off spending half as much on the Yunzii RT75Should I have built my own keyboard from scratch? Are you using a better 75% keyboard? Visit our friendly Discord community and join the discussion about keyboards, custom ultralight gaming mice, and other related interests!

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