🚀 go-pugleaf

(Carryover subject from the Shadow Warrior 2 thread)...

I switched to this keyboard some time ago.  It almost instantly became
my favorite peripheral (both for gaming and typing in general).  
The feel of the keyswitches alone are enough to spoil you and make it
impossible to ever return to non-mechanical keyboards.  Then there is
the key backlighting.  This is not the dim, difficult to read
backlighting of my old Logitech 510s, the key lighting is much
brighter (or I should say adjustable to a very bright setting,
dimmable if you prefer).  The model I have is a "compact" keyboard,
without the number pad on the right.  I prefer this more narrow
footprint because it allows me to position the mouse closer to the
keyboard for a better hand position, which helps tremendously with
ergonomics/recurring pain from prior sports injuries to my right arm.

Basically you can set the backlighting on a per-key basis using the
Razer configuration software (Synapse, which I already had installed
since I use a Razer mouse), and you can do that on a per-profile
basis.  For example you could make all the keys green, but the WASD
keys red if you wanted, and the lighting can be set bright enough that
the colors will be unmistakable even with strong overhead light.

I only recently got my first taste of the Chroma SDK.  Chroma lets
either a developer build support for the keyboard lighting into their
game, or allows for third party customizations (plus of course the
configurations you can do yourself using the Synapse software).  It
doesn't sound all that useful until you see it in action, which is
what happened for me with this game.  Shadow Warrior 2 is the first
game I have tried that supports Chroma out of the box.  Basically,
after loading the game and setting all my custom key bindings (the
first thing I do in a new game since I don't use the standard WASD
config), I noticed when I started the game, my keyboard changed to
show me where everything was on the keyboard (in other words, no need
to set manually anything in Razer's software, the game communicated it
back to the keyboard for me).  As I said, this doesn't sound
particularly useful when someone else explains it, but it shows at a
glance which keys are used by the game versus which ones are unmapped,
which is very helpful when you're new to the game and have not yet
memorized all the possible keystrokes.  The utility of this only truly
becomes apparent when you experience it.

You can accomplish some of the same benefit by simply creating your
own keyboard colorization layout with the common keys you use in most
games, then going into each game and mapping them, but the benefit of
just having the game do this for you, including slight differences in
key color based on the meaning of that keybinding in the game is
really a nice feature.

The number of games with support isn't huge at the moment, but it's
growing.  There are also some interesting user submissions here, like
Outlook support:

http://www.razerzone.com/chroma-workshop/#page-1

I've written here before that I can't use another gaming mouse after
getting used to the Razer Naga Hex, which I've been using for maybe 5
years or so now.  Aside from that I've been mostly ignoring Razer's
product line, just because their products tend to be pricey and until
you actually use them the price tag can seem hard to justify.  I
landed on this keyboard after making the change to mechanical switch
keyboards on my work setups -- once you get used to them you wont want
to type on anything else, and I feel the same way about this keyboard
for gaming now.  The durability / build quality is extraordinary. It's
built like a tank, and I suspect I'll be using it for a very long time
to come.