A brief reflection and look at how far our community has come since joining. I’ve been in the mechanical keyboard hobby for a very long time. It started as a high school student’s search for a keyboard for writing novels back in the 2008-2009 school year. I thought I wanted to be an author and I felt I needed a keyboard that I could sit down to at my desk and just write. After researching, joining forums, and saving money, I made my first purchase in the hobby, a blank black Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2. I still own this keyboard and while it is heavily modded now, it remains one of my all-time favorites. My HHKB Pro2 with MitchCapped Accents Many people would have stopped there, but keyboards became a hobby. I enjoyed learning about them, and early on, I enjoyed hunting for them in thrift shops. I would dig through bins at Goodwill and Salvation Army while popping keycaps off with paperclips looking for mechanical switches. I searched for a birthday Model M...
May 7, 2024
Clarification and precise words/description needed!!!
@Parak Okay that makes sense - making a configurator that will work with all Infinity boards. Hopefully this gets done in a reasonable time frame. I will post this information on the original Infinity configurator discussion thread.
The examples looks relatively simple. If there were a tutorial or link to a video tutorial on how to write your own custom kll, then a lot more people would be confident ordering it whilst the configurator is made ready. I'd prefer to edit a text file than using a web interface.
With the first round of Infinity, I've gotten a much better feel for how people actually use KLL. So I think I'm in a much better position to setup a demo tutorial.
However, I really think it's better that someone not the creator of something be the one to do basic tutorials (I'm much too likely to add interesting, but useless to most people, bits of information that may just confuse).
If you're really impatient, the spec is available. https://www.overleaf.com/read/zzqbdwqjfwwf
The big thing to get your head around when editing KLL files is dealing with USB key mappings *not* Scan Code mappings. This abstraction gains you a lot of convenience when using the layout on a keyboard with a completely different layout or underlying hardware. The example I use it that I only have to write 1 Colemak keymapping for *every* keyboard that supports the KLL (https://github.com/kiibohd/kll/blob/master/layouts/colemak.kll). There are other odd parts of the language (like assignment order, between lines and between files) that exist not because I wanted it to be odd, but because the alternative would be a lot more confusing.
My original intent though was to have almost everyone use a web interface to configure. It's just a lot less daunting. KLL is very complex. Not because I wanted it to be. It's complex due to the many accepted ways of interacting with keyboards that have to be accounted for. I already have a huge list of additional features I want to add to KLL so it will just become more and more daunting.
That being said, some people will want full control (like me), so I want hand editing to be a straight-forward way to configure a keyboard.
This default will be the one that ships with the keyboard, but like the original ErgoDox, the expectation is that everyone customizes it for what they like.