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
1 . Accent keys! Yellow lower rise will be beautiful for beige-gray combo. 2 . Code-Code-Hack-Hack won't do justice. Only 4 keys left to fill and all you get is only 2 type of text but each of them being doubled? I suggest go with Ctrl-Meta-Fn-Alt like usual. Or Ctrl-Code-Fn-Alt. 3 . Icon mods! With programmability is the heart of ortholinear keyboard, different approaches will be taken by different users and there will be the time your beautiful icon mods to shine. Because then there will be no obvious miss-legended keys! 4 . Spacebars. I still count spacebar as a (punctuation) character, not a modifier so with that in mind I believe beige color will be a more suitable choice than gray. Form follow function, right? (Also, the 2u spacebar in this kit will be convex? I mean like usual 6.25u spacebar on base kit).
Now for Dieter Rams / GOAT kit. 1 . These are just novelties, no doubt, but for a way this can be used to give touchtypist-planck guy a cheaper option to cover their board but only you add some keys to replace .,? So the planck will be fully covered. 2 . Again, while this is just novelties, wouldn't it be better if they use the same line and top-left positioning you use for the alphas? The way I see it now these runic is quite 'pointy' at the end of the line stroke.
Will add more suggestions later if there're any 👍🏼