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
The keyboard is great really sturdy and well made, LEDs are bright and the pre-built choices of LED configurations are nice and diverse. It has a nice heft to it and the colour is nice much better and darker than some of the pictures show. The switches (box whites for me) are amazing my favourite switches to date. Tactile and clicky without being obnoxiously loud - though they are loud.
However it is not perfect and here are the things you need to be aware of:
The keys are not illuminated uniformly with dark spots and darker ares on characters. My spacebar feels a tiny bit sticky compared to the rest of the keys. Not sure if some lubing/extended use will cure it The colour, no matter if I like it or not, it is miles miles miles different from the initial renders but not really different from the consequent pictures where people did say it is different. We were even given an easy way out of cancelling for a refund not that long ago even though this was for other reasons than the colour case.
One more issue I find but that has nothing to do with the keyboard itself is that I have been used to White/Night Fox kind of sized layouts where the backspace is right above the enter key so I keep hitting backslash when I really want to hit backspace but I am sure this nothing that a bit of typing won't fix!
Overall an 8/10 but much much better than I expected following some of the comments though again the most impressive feature for me is the box whites. Seriously addictive switches I am looking forward to a drop of those because I can see me wanting them for my ALT.
Also just as an aside the feet stay well in place for me for the most part, though I do not move my keyboard much and there are no dead LEDs either. Keycaps have a roughish texture but I quite like it although that also is not very uniform some are a bit rougher than others. Of course these are QC issues that obviously Massdrop has not ironed out and it definitely looks like an area where they need some serious improvement. Lets hope they have learnt some lessons and the ALT is an even better keyboard.