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 tricky bits are that biased 1.5u ESC, and 1U CTRL and ALTS: looks like I need to get both the Cadet Ergo and a Cadet TSangan to accomplish this. Unfortunately that's $55 for three keys, yikes. Not sure if I missed another combination to accomplish this.
Anyway, thanks for making this fabulous set. Very much looking forward to it.
About your question, have you thought about using novelty legends instead of regular ESC, TAB, etc?
There are other kit combinations that would save more but they involve having more than three keys with alternate legends.
If you want to spend even less money, you could use keys such as Sys from Base Set or Ares legends from GodX set for the Escape and maybe Ares legends or 1.5u Code from Tsangan (not currently used) for Del.
Another thing Ive seen race 3 users do is simply using 1u key for Escape (and/or Del) which in my opinion works just fine. That way you will be able to use yellow Abort or Mal for them.