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 myself, I've begun to hate sculptured of any type. My experiences with that were trying to get Modern Selectric to fit a JD45. That was an exercise in frustration. After that, I like SA for the looks (though the height does limit), and for function DSA, though I do like the uniform R3 Dangerzone, but most appear not to be inclined that way when making SA keysets.
I waffled on Chocolatier for a while, but the fact that it was sculptured SA (and the long lead time) led me to pass (I'm sure that will be a regret later).
What are others' favorite profile for look and for use? Any assumptions that I have made that are wrong?