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
Took me way longer than necessary, and I made quite a few mistakes, but now it's done I'm happier with the resulting keyboard.
I also spent some time using the configuration app to configure a native keymap since I'm using this on OSX and the built in keyboard modifiers don't work on third party Bluetooth keyboards. Took me quite a while to figure out it only supports 2 layers, but I eventually got the board configured the way I like. I did manage to crash the keyboard firmware once playing with the backlight, but I mostly keep it off so it's no big deal.
For future reference, if you reset the keyboard the programmed layer is completely blank. This confused the crap out of me initially.