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
When I do a quick google search to find vendors of switches with light pipes included, and it seems hit or miss and the light pipes are only limited in some switches but not available in others?
Is there some way that future Massdrop switch buys will have light pipe switch tops that I could put into this keyboard? Seems a bit of an oversight on my part, but now it seems a lot worse of a mistake since I can't seem to fix it.
Also yes in our usual kaihua speed switch drops - the switches do not have the light pipes built in (mostly because the pipe would prevent the switch from sitting flush with a lot of the PCBs out there and also prevent through hole LEDs from been used).
I'll see what we can do about making some of these switches more available.
Are all the available switches with CTRL (ALT as well) available with light pipes? I was looking at Box Whites possibly so I might be able to pick up a set of switches nobody needs on the mech market. But I've had my eye on Box Jade and Speed Bronze as well which is why I wondered if there were any available elsewhere. I thought I could just buy up speed gold switches and swap out the tops/light pipe, but it turns out, due to the whole different stem design, the bottom "pipe" area is narrower on the speed copper vs gold.
But sorry for the long winded response, but I'll keep my eye out if you guys do a light pipe switch drop between now and ~August when I get my CTRL. Thanks for your response!