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
Btw still like the keycaps I just think this pricetag is a bit big for ABS.
As for the price, that's mostly just due to this being a niche hobby. Since most sets require a fair amount of work to manufacture them given that they're custom, the operating costs are still somewhat high. Since very few people are even interested in custom keycap sets to begin with, we can't benefit from the economies of scale the more mainstream keyboards can benefit from. Groups like Razer or Corsair sell 100's of thousands of gaming keyboards, while GMK may only get a 1000 orders for this keycap set in total. Because they sell so many fewer sets in total, we all have to share a bigger portion of the costs it takes to make them. Thus why these custom sets get so expensive. Keep in mind, since many of these sets will only get run once, most keycap sets will hold their value within the community.
Hope this helped.