Mechanical Keyboard Switches Explained: Linear, Tactile and Clicky

A stem moves down inside a housing against a spring, and somewhere in that travel the keyboard decides the key has been pressed. In a classic mechanical switch that decision is made by two pieces of metal touching. The spring pushes the stem back up when you let go, and the whole assembly sits under one keycap, one per key. That is what separates a mechanical keyboard from a membrane one, where a single flexible sheet does the job for the whole board.

Three numbers describe that journey, and a switch page that publishes anything usually publishes these. Actuation force is how hard you have to push at the moment the press registers, given in grams or in centinewtons, which are close enough to the same thing that vendors use them interchangeably. The actuation point, sometimes called pre-travel, is where in the key's descent that happens. Total travel is simply how far the key can go before it stops, which is usually a good deal further.

For a sense of scale, CHERRY, whose MX switches are the ones the colour convention came from, currently lists its MX2A Red at 45 cN of actuation force, 2.0 mm of pre-travel and 4.0 mm of total travel. So on that switch you are pressing with about 45 grams of force, the keystroke registers halfway down, and there is another 2 mm of travel left underneath that does nothing except stop your finger.

That last 2 mm is worth knowing about, because hitting it is called bottoming out and it is where most of a keyboard's noise comes from. Nothing in the switch requires you to do it. Plenty of people never learn not to.

Linear is the simple one: constant, smooth resistance from top to bottom, with no bump and no click, so nothing at all tells you the key just registered. You either learn where the actuation point is or you bottom out every time to be sure. That predictability is why linears get recommended for gaming, where a key you can feather without a bump getting in the way is genuinely useful.

Tactile adds a bump. Partway down, resistance rises and then drops away, and your finger reads that as the moment the key took. The bump is a shape in the stem rather than a noisemaker: CHERRY says the brown switching slide is what produces the tactile characteristics of the MX2A Brown, and that the bulge on its surface is what sends the feedback. Nothing is added to make a sound, which is why a tactile switch is not much louder than a linear one. CHERRY describes that switch as noiseless and lists it at the same 45 cN and 2.0 mm as the Red.

Clicky is a tactile switch with a mechanism added specifically to make a sound. The click is deliberate, it is loud, and it is the whole point of the switch. CHERRY's MX2A Blue is listed as tactile and clicky together, at 50 cN of actuation force and a slightly deeper 2.2 mm pre-travel. If you like the sound, nothing else will satisfy you. If you share a room, this is the family to avoid, and the people around you will not be shy about telling you so.

None of the three is better. They are three answers to the question of what a key should tell you when it works, and the honest way to choose is to decide whether you want to feel the press, hear it, or neither.

The convention comes from CHERRY, whose MX line has used colour to distinguish switch variants for decades, and it spread because it worked: once Red meant linear on one brand, a second brand had every reason to use Red the same way. Gateron and Keychron both follow it, which is why the colour tells you something real on a Keychron board.

It is a convention rather than a standard, though, and that distinction matters when you are about to spend money. Nobody administers it. The force behind a colour varies between makers and between generations of the same maker's own switch, so two Brown switches from two brands are the same category and not the same part. Widely repeated figures for the classic Cherry colours put Brown at 55 g and Blue at 60 g, which is not what CHERRY's own current pages say; the safe habit is to read the spec for the switch you are buying rather than the number you remember.

Then there are the brands that opt out entirely and use words instead of colours. Logitech sells its low-profile boards with options labelled Tactile Quiet, Clicky and Linear; Razer does the same with its optical switches. NuPhy goes further and gives its house switches plant names, then writes the feel and the gram weight next to each one, which is more information than any colour has ever carried.

The practical rule: treat the colour as a strong hint on a board that uses the convention, and as no information at all on a board that does not. Keychron V1 listing a Blue option tells you something. A switch called Wisteria tells you nothing until you read what NuPhy says it is, which in that case is tactile.

Actuation force is the one people over-think. The realistic spread on a normal keyboard runs from the high 30s to the low 60s in grams, and the difference between the ends of that range is noticeable but not dramatic. Lighter switches are easier to press quickly and easier to press by accident. Heavier ones ask for more deliberate presses and tire some people out over a long day. If you have no idea where you sit, the middle of the range is the middle for a reason.

NuPhy Air60 V2 is unusually helpful here because the numbers are right there in the option list rather than buried: its four house switches are published at 37gf, 45gf, 55gf and 60gf, with the two lighter ones linear and the two heavier ones tactile. That single list is a better education in what the gram figure means than any amount of reading, because it holds the brand constant and varies only the weight.

Actuation point is the one that actually changes how a keyboard behaves. A shorter pre-travel registers sooner, which feels faster and makes accidental presses more likely; a longer one does the reverse. Razer publishes 1.2 mm for its Linear Optical switch and 1.5 mm for its Clicky Optical, both well short of the 2.0 mm typical of a contact switch, and that gap is most of what people mean when they call a gaming keyboard fast.

Total travel is mostly a comfort question, and it is where low-profile boards differ most from full-height ones. A low-profile switch has less distance to give, so the whole action feels shallower and quicker. Whether that is pleasant or cramped is personal, and it is the one thing on this page you really cannot settle by reading.

Clicky is the one family that makes a noise on purpose, so avoiding blue is most of the answer. It is not all of it, and this is the thing beginners most often get wrong: a linear switch is quieter than a clicky one and it is not quiet. On most boards the loudest single event is the keycap and stem hitting the bottom of their travel, and that happens on every switch family. CHERRY sells a damped linear, the MX2A Silent Red, whose stem carries a patented noise-reduction design, which is not a product you build if linears were already quiet.

What else the sound depends on has nothing to do with the switch at all. Keycap material and thickness change the pitch, plastic cases absorb what aluminium ones ring with, foam inside the case damps resonance, and poorly fitted stabilisers under the big keys rattle regardless of what you put under the small ones. Two boards with identical switches can sound quite different, which is why a switch name alone will never predict how loud your desk is going to be.

If quiet is the actual requirement, start by ruling out clicky and looking for a switch the vendor labels silent or quiet outright. Logitech MX Mechanical is the clearest example here of a vendor naming that intent for you: its options are listed as Tactile Quiet, Clicky and Linear, so the quiet one is not something you have to infer. After that it is down to your own typing. Avoiding hard bottom-outs can reduce typing noise, but the switch and keyboard construction still matter.

If the noise is really a whole-desk problem rather than a keyboard one, the same question runs across the mouse and the headphones too. That is the subject of A quiet home-office setup, for shared rooms and back-to-back calls.

Both replace the part that detects the press while leaving the spring-and-stem part alone, which is why they still come in linear and clicky versions. The feel and the detection method are separate questions, and it is easy to assume otherwise.

An optical switch breaks a beam of light instead of closing a metal contact. Razer, which uses these across the Huntsman line, describes the stem passing through a light beam as the moment of actuation, and the practical consequence is that there is no contact bounce to filter out, so the small debounce delay a contact switch needs disappears. Razer rates its optical switches at 100 million keystrokes, and puts the industry norm it is measuring against at 50 million, since nothing metal is wearing against anything metal here. Treat the second figure as Razer's framing rather than a settled number: contact switches from other makers are rated all over the place. Razer Huntsman Mini sells the same board with a clicky or a linear optical switch, which is the cleanest demonstration that optical is not itself a feel.

A magnetic switch, usually called Hall effect, puts a magnet on the stem and a sensor under it, and measures how close the two are. That is a continuous position rather than an on or off, and it is a genuinely different capability: the keyboard can be told to register the press at any depth you like, and can re-register a key the instant it starts moving down again without waiting for it to come back up. SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL Gen 3 exposes exactly that, with an actuation point settable from 0.1 to 4.0 mm per key, and Razer Huntsman V3 Pro Tenkeyless does the same thing optically with its analog switches across the same range.

One catch worth knowing before you buy: magnetic switches do not fit ordinary hot-swap sockets. They need a board built for them, and a normal mechanical board cannot be converted. That is the trade for the adjustability, and it is why the boards that offer it list one switch rather than a menu.

On a hot-swappable board, yes, and cheaply. Hot-swap means the switches sit in sockets rather than being soldered to the circuit board, so you pull one out with a small puller and press a different one in. No soldering is needed, but take your time and follow the board’s switch-removal instructions. Plenty of mechanical boards are built this way; plenty of others do not state it either way, which is not the same as saying no.

This is the honest recommendation for anyone who has read this far and still cannot decide. Buying hot-swappable turns an irreversible choice into a reversible one for the price of a switch set, and short of pressing a switch yourself in a shop, it is the closest thing to an answer to a feel question, which is not something this site can settle for you.

Which boards actually give you the choice is a separate question from what the choices are, and it is answered board by board in Which mechanical switch should you pick? A board-by-board guide. If you would rather see these keyboards with the mice and headphones next to them instead, the setup builder puts all three columns side by side.