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
Juuust a couple of things, though. I reseated about 20 keycaps after removing the seriously WTF plastic shrink wrap around the keyboard. I was aware of the loose keycaps, but the shrink wrap was a surprise. The Caps key has a bit something stuck to the top of it. It's not pizza, and it won't come off. The stabilized keys have a lot of wobble, but I'm okay with it. That's just how this thing rolls. I'm still shocked that nobody has copied Ducky's Fn+spacebar palette chooser function for the backlight. The backlight is pretty nice, it's a shame there's only 8 colors available (unless I missed something). Lastly, the actuation distance is pretty deep, is there a way to change this?
I was willing to put up with less of a keyboard to support this project, but I'm pretty happy with this thing.