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
Harder core virtualization was needed. But the sticking point is that you still need Windows and I wasn't interested in buying a whole copy of Windows just to run this one program. I could have tried running some Windows emulation on Linux on Mac, but then you're back in the same problem from above. I also briefly thought about bootcamp etc. but I'd still have the USB emulation+passthrough problem unless I installed windows directly.
VirtualBox to the rescue! VirtualBox has pretty robust emulation/connection tools and a plethora of different images. At first I thought I'd have to "borrow" a working Windows image to run the program, but Microsoft makes free images available for testing purposes.
- The tools https://github.com/GonzaloAlvarez/ifd68 - Some handy instructions, most of which apply for the Mac version of VirtualBox: https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/oldgrub - Free and totally legal IE images (I used IE8) from Microsoft: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/
Extremely abbreviated and probably incomplete instructions for legally reprogramming your Keywalker on a Mac:
- Clone https://github.com/GonzaloAlvarez/ifd68 to your Mac. - Download VirtualBox. - Download free IE8 VM image from Microsoft website. - Install IE8 VM. - Install Virtual Box tools to VM. - Reboot (many times). - Share cloned ifd68 directory through VirtualBox. - Plug in IFD68 keyboard to USB port. - Add IFD68 keyboard to VM via Devices -> USB menu item. - Navigate to shared ifd68 directory in the VM, it's on the network - Run fd68/software/original/programmer/IFD68.exe and Bob's your uncle!
That was easy, right! ;-)
Anyways, I reprogrammed my my CapsLock key to now be the left ctrl key and I am a happy camper! Using the Keywalker in bluetooth mode right now to type these instructions. Many thanks to GonzaloAlvarez, Oracle, and Microsoft for providing the tools I used for this.