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
Turns out, you can. There are Bluetooth dongles supporting "HID proxy" mode which basically means they'll connect to a Bluetooth keyboard and/or mouse and expose it to the host OS as a USB keyboard/mouse.
I have not tried this yet (waiting for my VB87M), but it appears that a Laird BT820 dongle will work in HID proxy mode for BLE devices. You can also switch it over to HCI mode under Windows 8 or Linux (don't know about Mac, didn't check) to hand off control to the OS if you like.
I couldn't use the keyboard in BIOS yet - not sure why. It might be that my BIOS doesn't understand a composite device. Media keys also don't work yet. Right now I feel confident that with some more tweaking I could resolve both issues.