Anti-ghosting in Keyboards Explained: Why Does It Matter?

The phrase Anti-ghosting gets thrown around a lot when it comes to gaming keyboards or just mechanical keyboards in general, but what does it mean?

First I want to quickly go over what ghosting is and how it can affect your experience when using a keyboard in general. Ghosting is basically when your keyboard doesn’t input the keypress even though you pressed it. This can happen for a lot of reasons but the main reason is that the keyboard cannot recognize each keypress if you are pressing down more than one or two keys at a time. So for example the shortcut “Control+Alt+Delete” may not output correctly due to the fact that there are more keypresses than the keyboard can recognize. This can be a big issue when gaming and that is why if you go to buy a gaming keyboard, usually they will be advertising this feature as one of its pros.

Unfortunately, there is no real way to fix this issue if your keyboard doesn’t already have it built in as you would need to rewire the keyboard entirely to remove this issue. So what Anti-ghosting does is basically make it so no matter how many keys you press, the keyboard will always recognize each keypress and it will properly show up on your computer. When looking for an anti-ghosting keyboard, make sure to check if the keyboard is fully anti-ghosting or if it is only certain keys because if it isn’t 100%, then it will only work on a certain section of keys such as “WASD” for example.

Anti-ghosting is one of those features on a keyboard you never really think about, but it always helps you when pressing more than one key press. It is an essential feature that often gets overlooked, but once it is gone, you will be wishing it was still there.