Make Your Keyboard Sound Like The Old Buckle Spring Keyboards In Linux

If you were born before 90’s, you might remember using the buckle spring keyboards. Even if you did not use them, you might have seen it in 90’s movies where they show people using computers with a pale yellow keyboard making a specific sound while typing.

Still, don’t recall? Here, watch a video of the buckle spring keyboard.

The keyboards these days are super smooth and they don’t make that much of noise but imagine someone chatting in the 90’s. You could hear the typing sound from the other room.

Now you might get a bit nostalgic about the bygone era of early days of personal computers. Good thing is that you can use an open source utility that imitates the sound of buckle spring keyboard on your modern computer.

Want to know how does it sound? Here’s a video I posted on our YouTube channel (do subscribe to it for more tutorials):

Intrigued? Let me show you how can you use on your Linux computer.

Bucklespring keyboard sound on Linux

Buckle Spring Keyboard sound in Linux

If you are using Ubuntu, you are in luck. You can easily install it with Snap. All you need to do is to run the command below:

sudo snap install bucklespring

One added advantage of using Snap is that you don’t need to do any special configuration.

If you don’t want to use Snap, you can use apt-get instead. However, it didn’t work for me on Ubuntu 16.04 because the bucklespring package was not found in the repository. You can try your luck, nonetheless.

sudo apt-get install bucklespring

Arch Linux users may find it in AUR. For others, you can always build it from the source code:

Bucklespring on GitHub 

Once installed, you can run it using the command below:

bucklespring.buckle

While the bucklespring program is running, everything key you press on your keyboard will make a noise and give you the feel of the old buckle spring keyboard.

When you think it’s enough of nostalgic memories, just close the program (ctrl+c in the terminal). 

I hope you liked this little program and lived a part of our past again. Your comments and suggestions are welcome :)

About the author
Abhishek Prakash

Abhishek Prakash

Created It's FOSS 11 years ago to share my Linux adventures. Have a Master's degree in Engineering and years of IT industry experience. Huge fan of Agatha Christie detective mysteries 🕵️‍♂️

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