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
So is this a good and possibly last buy for a beginner? 1. Will this work seamlessly with a Mac? Including the cli tool thats required for updating the firmware? 2. I'm assuming the function layers are like mapping macros? Or are they mapped to just one key? 3. How easy will this be to clean? There is a shit ton of dust where I live and I also have three cats that shed like nobody's business :) Thanks!
1) Yes this will work with a Mac including the CLI. 2) Yes the function keys can be assigned to any key (or multi-key press) 3) It depends on how deep of a cleaning you would want to do. If you use canned air or compressed air it would be pretty quick if you did it every day (just give it a spray down) if you wanted to completely take it apart it wouldn't be too bad either because you can remove the switches and such.
1. It should work great with a Mac, but you might want someone with actual experience to confirm. As far as I can tell, the Input Club configurator is 100% web-based, so you can do your configuration in a webpage, and it generates a firmware file for you to upload to the keyboard.
2. Function layers are basically, when you're in that "layer" your entire keyboard can be bound to different keys if you wish. You can bind a key to cycle you to the next function layer, or previous, or send you to a specific function layer. So if you wanted, you could have one function layer that is basically "num lock" and emulates a num pad (RealForce does this on their boards). I'm not really sure what else people do with it as I've never had a board that supports layering yet. Check out https://input.club/configurator/ as that is their configurator for WhiteFox and will most likely be very similar for this board and it might make more sense if you see it visually.
3. I find most mech keyboards are pretty easy to clean as long as you don't spill stuff inside the bezel. Just pop all the caps off and use a canned air on it. For stuff in between the keys I use a Q-tip. I'm not really sure if this board is going to be easier or harder to clean than normal though. I will say that this board will almost certainly be really easy to open up, so if you do have hair/dust floating into the part that's normally hard to access, this board will make that part easier.