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
That said I'm probably still going to pick up Cyberdeck too, because I have absolutely no self control...
Would there be extra caps left unused in the Gaijin/Blocknet kits that I could use to cover some of the remaining keys?
You won't have enough keys with just Gaijin + Blocknet no matter how you spin it, unfortunately. You have two alternatives:
1. Buy the base on top of those 2 kits, which really is a great idea unless you're SUPER hard pressed for money because once you receive the set in a few month's time you'll be able to just take away the function keys you need for yourself and sell the reminder of the base for like a 60% profit on mechmarket.
2. Buy Mitowaves and use novelties in place of the function keys that you need to cover. This would be the best way to go about it if you're struggling to justify the cost at this very moment since those will probably end up setting you back like 40 bucks max instead of 110.