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 anyone who doesn't know, stenography allows you to press multiple keys simultaneously that correspond to syllables, words, or phrases. The keypress combos are in mnemonic patterns so that the more patterns you learn, the faster you learn more. The end result is that you can type blazingly fast with a relatively relaxed typing pace. The strange keycaps are designed to make it easier to type the combinations of keys required by stenography: one finger often has to press two rows simultaneously.
The tooling for the custom keycaps was expensive due to such low volume production, so I'm looking to see if anyone else knows about or is interested in learning stenography. Spreading out the tooling costs over multiple keyboards can make these boards very cheap very quickly relative to their original price.