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
There just isn't a demand for them on higher end boards to hit MOQ (minimum order quantity). Dedicated media keys are generally reserved for lower-quality "g4m3r" style boards.
Most people who own higher end keyboards who also care about tactile audio control already own dedicated amps/DACs for their PCs. I know I do, and my headphone amp has an extremely nice Alps 27 volume pot on it, much better than anything offered on any keyboard on the market today.
It's worth pointing out that I am not at all talking down your preferences or what you're looking for, it's just the nature of the market. This assumes you're trying to get into higher quality mechanical keyboards. It'll be difficult, but you can find or build a really nice keyboard that has dedicated media controls, but a volume wheel just isn't going to be feasible unless you go 100% custom and do it yourself. At that point you're looking at around $500-900 for the complete board.
You can get USB volume wheels for $30. What's nice about a separate wheel is that you can use them regardless of whatever keyboard strikes your fancy at that moment, and unifies headphone controls.
However, I built this for $15 bucks. Just Google "Rotary Encoder Volume Wheel". It's powered by a pro-micro clone and a rotary encoder knob. A little solder, a little hot glue, a little copy-pasta and *DONE* . (I mostly did a DIY so I know for a fact it will work with Mac, and in the future I can add more buttons to have more features)