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
You can check it out on Kickstarter.
What is Kumo? Kumo is Japanese for 'Cloud'. Steven, art director for TheVan Keyboards, lives in Japan and I live in the USA. We wanted to embrace both of our homes with this launch. We have incorporated both English and Japanese Legends into the keycap set. When we were children we use to look up to the clouds and imagine all sorts of things. We carry that on with Kumo. We see the endless possibilities of what a keyboard can be and do.
Why Plastic? Producing a plastic case has several advantages.
- Lowers production cost
- Gets us into plastic production
- Reduces production time
- Tons of color choices
Ultimately we would like to produce our HuB keycap profile. To get there we need to get into plastics. Our case is a relatively easy mold to do and is fairly inexpensive. This seemed like a great logical step for us to get closer to making HuB a reality.Lowering Production cost and as a result lowering retail price is another huge benefit. Lowering the barrier to entry will allow us to share the joy of 40% keyboards with many more people.
RGB Indicators This is the first MiniVan with RGB leds. A whopping 3 of them. In conjunction with our configurator you can easily redefine what the LEDs indicate and in which colors they do so. This is immensely useful for knowing which layers are active, seeing how long the tapping term is for tap keys, or indicating traditional keyboard states (num lock, caps lock, scroll lock, etc.)
We are excited to share Kumo with the Massdrop community and hope you will join us on our journey.
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