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
For actual work I currently use a TKL. Muscle memory for me is fairly hard to overcome, and in different contexts I reach for different keys - for instance, hjkl navigation in vi is second nature, but I still use arrow keys in a lot of GUI apps.
I've been playing with a 60% at home. I can see adapting to hjkl nav for everything, and like that it requires me to think about and use the layers; it makes me experiment with it. Which is a huge time sink (especially when I screw it up and have to figure out what I did), but that's part of the entertainment value. And I have a VE.A coming, which should waste a ton of time.
Playing with the idea of going in the opposite direction and designing a seriously huge, absurd board.
One design choice I've been thinking about is potentially providing separate controllers for different parts of the board, meaning you could control programming of separate portions independently. This would potentially be really confusing, but would mean, for instance, your alphas and normal mods could be set for different languages or layouts and a cluster or two could independently track customization for different applications. Of course it would probably be much less confusing and less technically complex to just use a beefier controller.