Your pen skipped. Which refill should you buy?

斷水了……要買什麼筆芯？懶人包

2026.07.028 min readEveryday

Buying GuidesLORE LAB

People keep telling you your pen writes beautifully. Most of the time they're complimenting the refill, not the pen.

I lend my pens out a lot, and people always say the same thing: this writes really well. What they're praising usually isn't the EDC pen; it's the quality of the refill inside it.

I've been in the pen world for years and have bought close to a hundred different models. This is about the refill sizes you actually meet in EDC: Tactile Turn, Nottingham Tactical, Fellhoelter, Big Idea Design, CIVIVI, WEKNIFE and the rest.

Four families of ink

• Water-based: smooth, low tack, feathers when wet, skips more easily, works on fewer surfaces (fountain pens).
• Gel: beloved of Japanese refill fans and standard issue for students in Taiwan. Smooth, low tack, sits between oil and water, can feather, but holds colour and comes in every shade (Pilot Juice).
• Hybrid: my favourite. Common abroad and in Taiwan's exam pens: more oil than water, slightly tacky but not noticeably, smooth and fast drying, fewer colours (Parker).
• Oil-based: the European and American standard. High tack, nearly waterproof, fade-resistant; most of these inks are European patents (Fisher).

Almost every maker produces a G2-size refill, a size regularly confused with the Pilot G2 pen. G2 has a defined dimension, and Tactile Short, Fellhoelter, Big Idea Design and the Mito P-130 all take it.

G2: what's worth buying

D1: the mini-EDC size

If you like tiny pens, D1 is a good answer. Less common, but standard in a lot of 4+1 multipens: the Lamy 2000 and Kaweco are the classic examples, and Japanese-pen people will know the Zebra Sharbo.

Tactile Turn Mini, and the discontinued Pilot G2

If you're hunting a Pilot G2 replacement for the Tactile Turn Mini: it's discontinued, stop looking. Use a D1 refill with an adapter instead.

Fisher refills are the other interesting option. During the space race, the Americans wanted astronauts to be able to write in zero gravity, where ink won't flow to the tip, hence the pressurised Fisher cartridge. The Russians used pencils and saved a lot of money; whether graphite dust in the instruments was a good trade is another story. With an adapter sleeve, a Fisher refill fits G2 pens.