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
This is my keyboard:
You can see it in action here:
https://youtu.be/GHlgqIOg6_0
At the end of the day, you have to figure out if you want a 60%, TKL, full-size... Or maybe a 65%, even a 40%. It’s all personal preference.
Notable exceptions are Topre, Matias and Logitech Romer G keyboards. With these you have a much smaller range of options for keycaps.
To my mind, the best of all are Cherry MX compatible keyboards which allow you to replace both the keycaps and the switches - such as the Massdrop ALT or the GMMK. Then you can play with over 100 different types of switches as well as many dozens of keycaps.
It's worth a bit of googling to learn about keycap profiles, materials and so on before going too wild. It can save you a lot of money.