Classic-TKL Underscore Edition review: dressed to kill (in beige)

You probably know just by looking at it if the Classic-TKL Underscore Edition is for you. Do you want a retro-looking wired keyboard without a number pad? Great. Do you care that it doesn’t have wireless? Perfect. Do you want it preassembled? Buddy, you’re in the right place.

But Nathan, you might say, preassembled is the regular way to buy a keyboard. That is the baseline expectation. Most people buying a cake expect a cake, not a box of cake mix. And that’s true, for most people and most keyboards. But until now, the Classic-TKL has only been available as a bare-bones kit, and now you can buy one ready to go, with quality components, for less than the price of doing a similar build yourself.

If you’re like me, figuring out what keycaps, switches, and stabilizers to use, then putting them all together, is a big part of the fun of mechanical keyboards. But if you just want something to type with that looks retro and sounds and feels nice, without having to build it yourself — or if you were going to use classic beige keycaps anyway — then the Underscore Edition might be up your alley.

The $189 NovelKeys Classic-TKL Underscore Edition is a wired-only, gasket-mounted tenkeyless mechanical keyboard. It has an injection-molded plastic case with a high forehead, reminiscent of the 18-year-old Realforce 86U, and a silicone mat on the base for sound dampening. It also has hot-swap MX switches, full RGB backlighting, and a light bar (both of which can be turned off), and it’s fully programmable using the Via web app.

The Classic-TKL has been around for a couple of years in kit form. I built one and wrote about it in 2024; I also tested the glow-in-the-dark version. I like them a lot! But apparently not everyone who wants a nice retro-looking keyboard also wants a craft project. Michael Sickler, who owns NovelKeys, told me that the Underscore Edition is aimed at giving NovelKeys’ keyboard enthusiast customer base something they can recommend to friends and family. It’s also aimed at professionals who might lurk on the keyboard subreddits and Discords enough to know what they want, but don’t want to build it themselves. (This is basically the same thing Ryan Norbauer told me about his Seneca, except the Seneca is 20 times more expensive.)

The Underscore Edition comes in clay (warm beige), boulder (taupe-ish), and lichen (a dusty green). My review unit is clay, but I’d buy the lichen personally. It ships with NovelKeys’ own Classic Blue switches, GMK CYL Classic Beige keycaps, a USB A-to-C cable, and preinstalled and pretuned TypePlus stabilizers.

These are name-brand parts. GMK CYL keycaps are the benchmark for doubleshot Cherry-profile keycaps. They’re several steps in quality above the keycaps that come with a Keychron, for example. The letters and numbers are crisp and clear and the consistency is unmatched. They’re also expensive; you’d pay at least $120 if you bought them on their own, though you would get more keycaps. The Classic-TKL comes with just the ones you need to cover the board.

The TypePlus stabilizers are also a good choice; I’ve installed and tuned a couple sets myself, but the people who made them do a better job. There’s no rattle or tick on any of the stabilized keys. And the Classic Blue linear switches (also made by TypePlus) are also nice. They’re smooth and stable, with almost no wobble; at 53g actuation force and 63g bottom-out, they’re medium-heavy, like a lighter version of the Cherry MX Blacks in my first-ever mechanical keyboard in 2009. They’re not silent, but they’re also not as loud as you’d expect a keyboard this beige to be. (I still feel like a blue switch should be clicky, though.)

I try to avoid the “fans of the genre” review. You know, “if this is the kind of thing you like, you’re going to like it.” But once you get past the strictly utilitarian, pretty much everything about mechanical keyboards comes down to preference and taste.

The Classic-TKL Underscore Edition is a well-executed version of what it is. If you want an earth-tone retro-looking tenkeyless board — a classic TKL, if you will — with linear switches and beige Cherry-profile keycaps, it’s a great choice.

When you think of it as a high-quality preassembled version of an enthusiast DIY keyboard, with name-brand parts, it’s also a good deal. I built the DIY version of the same board with the same stabilizers and similarly priced keycaps in September 2024. It worked out to $276, and took me an hour to put together (most of which was spent lubing and tuning the stabilizers). The Underscore Edition costs $189, $100 more than the bare-bones kit. You can’t get keycaps, switches, and stabilizers of this quality for $100 combined.

But it’s also true that $189 can get you a lot of keyboard these days, especially if you’re not attached to the Classic-TKL’s particular vibe.

Even within the tenkeyless form factor, the Evoworks Evo80 costs $169 and comes with an aluminum case and both Bluetooth and 2.4GHz wireless. Same for the $179 Wobkey Crush 80. But those are different keyboards, with different aesthetics. The 8BitDo Retro 87 is closer, with several classic-computing-inspired flavors including Commodore 64 and IBM Model M, for around $100. But — no disrespect to the 8BitDo here — those look maybe a smidge more casual than the Classic-TKL.

I prefer the Classic-TKL’s plastic chassis to the aluminum of the Evoworks or Wobkey boards. But I wouldn’t mind if it had wireless. It’d also be nice if it shipped with a few extra keycaps, in case you want Mac legends or Control in its proper place (Caps Lock). While I’m being picky: I also wish it came with the option for MTNU Classic Beige keycaps, rather than just CYL, because I like MTNU better. An electrocapacitive switch option would be nice too, but now I’m just getting greedy. (Actually, now I’m just reinventing the Realforce.)

If you want the Classic-TKL in a different color, or with different switches or keycaps, there’s still the kit version and the Glo version. And if you want a different keyboard entirely, well, those abound. The Classic-TKL Underscore Edition is the thing that it is, and it’s good at that.

I’d still go for the green one, though.

Photography by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge except where noted.