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
Whilst a far cry from e-ink/OLED Keycaps. I have managed to squeeze in dynamic active keymap display that is still readable. I will put up my Github fork of qmk with the required changes to make this work once i've had a bit more time to clean it up. And once I get my Left hand PCB board to finish building the kit!!!
Here are some screen-shots for now.
Momentary works as do active layers.
I had to place the 5th row beneath the thumb cluster to make this work. Currently this uses ugfx font rendering - but I may make it into a script that generates a pixmap at compile-time and use that rather than font based rendering. This would allow damage regions so you could stream keypresses and say invert an area of the Display (so you get on-keypress display). But that's for another time. Currently this required a bit of math and luck with the C string arrays and testing a bunch of fonts and giving to the black magic that is ugfx wordwrap function.
Don't raise issues; as I've mentioned I don't have half the keyboard so how it behaves with two sides YMMV