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
keycode number = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
The keycode number is the geographical location of the button. The numbers represent the 4 layouts (groups) available. Each group has two levels, the first one is accessed by pressing the button and the second by pressing shift plus the button. You can either navigate through the four groups or access them with a modifier key. This is the case of altgr, which in the xmodmap system is named as ISO_Level3_Shift. Therefore, a fresh linux install will use only two groups, 1 2, and 5 6. This means that 1 is when you press a key normally, 2 the shift + the key, 5 altgr + the key, and 6 shift + altgr + the key. The second group, 3 4, you can access by pressing a new modifier that you have to remap called Mode_switch. The fourth group is kinda useless and I don't know how to access by a modifier key nor even if that modifier key exists. For instance, this are some lines in my custom xmodmap file:
keycode 30 = u U BackSpace NoSymbol downarrow uparrow downarrow keycode 31 = i I Escape NoSymbol rightarrow idotless rightarrow keycode 32 = o O Return keycode 43 = h H Left keycode 44 = j J Down keycode 45 = k K Up keycode 46 = l L Right keycode 54 = c C Caps_Lock keycode 57 = n N Tab ISO_Left_Tab endash
I remap Mode_switch to caps lock location, Super_L (Win key) to tab in order to navigate trough the tiling window manager which I use, and control_L to shift_L. To navigate through the four groups is necessary to remap this four keys: ISO_Next_Group, ISO_Prev_Group, ISO_Last_Group, ISO_First_Group.
With these modifications I already use my tenkeyless keyboard as a 40% one. By the way, sorry for my pretty bad English skills.
I do wish they stopped putting in those dumb windows keys though.