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
While Tai-Hao is actually cheap, SP is quite expensive (nearly as expensive as GMK) and JTK is reasonably priced, but there are no ISO-options and they are pretty new to the game, so nobody knows how well their keycaps will age. If I'm not mistaken, GMK still produces in Germany which doesn't exactly benefit the price either.
I know GMK GBs always seem incredibly expensive, especially compared with f.e. the dirt cheap Vortex doubleshot PBT keycaps (which have pretty warped legends and like 3 colours total), but there just is no another, cheaper way to achieve this colourway. Especially if you want pad-printed ABS doubleshots.
This set is also GMK and it's slightly cheaper than the SNES, which was priced at $119. If you don't like the colors, that's fine, but don't complain about the price when you were willing to dive right into the SNES buy.