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
- Mod kits often come with proper legends for 1u Ctrl, Alt, Super, Hyper, etc. whereas Ortho kits are split nowadays on whether they use proper legends or meaningless "assembly-style" legends or blanks
- Mod kits often come with both text and arrows direction keys whereas Ortho kits usually only come with one or the other. Additionally, Ortho kits often assume a single-row set of direction keys whereas I prefer a standard arrow cluster with the up-arrow one row above the down-arrow (this gives me an additional available layer key on my bottom row and preserves my d-pad muscle memory) -- I originally got this idea from a layout on Reddit and have since seen many other ortho pics with something similar.
- Mod kits often come with mod-colored Tilde as an option and mod-colored Double-quote as an option where sometimes Ortho kits don't.
I know that not all of these reasons apply to a set like Godspeed, plus for Godspeed I'm not as interested in proper mod legends as I would prefer the novelty mission control style text legends or micons. I am sorry that I was not aware of the IC. I was aware of the Massdrop discussion you linked and of your project page, but the main picture of the keycap profile only shows 012344 so I missed the fact that Ortho used a different profile. To be clear, I actually do prefer the profile you chose for your Ortho kit and I agree that is it more comfortable. if I had been aware of the IC then the only suggestion I would have made is for a few more R5 novelties and R5 arrows in the arrows kit, because the only option for Ortho users to use arrows is for them to piece together something using the standard TKL mod kits and novelties.