Support for Alternative Layouts
This is a summary of how alternative layouts have been supported by kits such as Colevrak and Homing. It is not a discussion of alt layout performance and development, but if that interests you I highly recommend starting with Pascal Getreuer’s A guide to alt keyboard layouts (why, how, which one?). It’s a concise and comprehensive overview with links to some great sites that go deeper. He also has a separate Links about keyboards page. The Keyboard layouts doc he recommends explains layout goals and metrics in detail, summarizing the alt layouts discussed here as well as more than one hundred others. Sculpted-profile The majority of custom keycap sets are sculpted-profile (Cherry, SA, MT3, KAT, etc. - more on profiles generally here) so let’s start there. Because each row has a unique keycap shape, alt layouts require a unique keycap for each legend that moves off its QWERTY row. At first there were two The Dvorak layout was patented in 1936 by August Dvorak & William L....
Apr 23, 2024
I will be selling mine. The lights are fancy and OK but i find it more distracting than anything.
Also I don't know who leads this drop, but the stems I got were not ALPS, but Cherry MX stems. Which is better, since you can customise the keycaps much more easily or cannibalize the board for the nice see-through keycaps.
I bought this same keyboard from Amazon a few months ago and received the ALPS-compatible stems as pictured in the photo. They were hot swappable, but they were also practically stuck in the face plate, and it took a ton of force/cursing/macerated fingertips to get them out. Several did fracture as pictured (see top row) below:
So, it is technically hot swappable, but the tight fit of the factory switches in the face plate (and associated switch fracture), the oddball pin pattern, and the ALPS stems make this the most poorly thought out hot swappable keyboard in history.