[jetpacktuxedo]

>In tacticale switches the bump and the making of the contact are mechanically connected.

Nope! This is rarely (if ever?) the case. In alps switches, for example, there are two totally separate leafs, one of which handles the tactile feeling and the other of which is responsible for the actual actuation. If you browse through Haata's Plotly[1] you can see that many switches actuate well after the tactile bump. Though they are often pretty closely related in terms of their depth in the keypress, they are wholly unrelated from one another mechanically.

[1] https://plot.ly/~haata

[dom0]

> Nope! This is rarely (if ever?) the case.

Cherry MX.

[jetpacktuxedo]

False. You can bend the leaf of a cherry MX switch into all sorts of wild shapes to move the tactile event up and down the press, but the actuation will stay in largely the same place. If you browse the force curves from the link I posted above, you can see that some switches (cherry MX Brown, for example) actuate well after the tactile event.

The tactile event on a Cherry MX Brown is ~1mm into the travel distance, and the actual actuation is ~2mm in. Kaihua Box Orange switches (still an MX-style switch) is an even better example of that. Kaihua Speed Bronze has the actuation point inside of the tactile bump instead of after the bump. I can't find any examples of switches that actuate _before_ the tactile bump (mostly because why would anyone design that?), but tactility and actuation are not inherently tied together in cherry MX switches, either.

They are both handled by a two-part leaf, which you can sort of see in some of the pictures on Deskthority[1]. There are two legs on the slider that have a surface to them that determines the tactility (or lack thereof in the case of linear switches) that slide linearly up and down the top leaf, which flexes it until it makes contact with the bottom leaf. That contact causes the actuation. All of the tactility is determined bu the shape of the slider legs.

[1] https://deskthority.net/wiki/Cherry_MX#Construction

[dom0]

So you are saying that what makes the tactility (the slider moving on the spring) and that what makes the contact (the slider moving the spring until it touches some other metal) are the same, which is exactly what I said ("mechanically connected").

How the making or breaking of the contact is related in terms of travel to the key press force doesn't have much to do with that.

The point I made was simply that on other kinds of keyboards the two are not related. On a rubber mat keyboard you can keep the dome depressed yet not actuate, for example. The collapse of the dome is also harder to control than the resistance against the spring. That makes preloading harder.