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
Alrighty, I can't take it anymore. I tried typing this comment with the XMIT keyboard itself, but it's just unusable. In my case, it's specifically the spacebar, and it's caused by the stabilizers they put on this thing. They are just the worst. They aren't attached to anything, so they just fall out of the keyboard if you remove the keys they're on, of which a couple came off in shipping and I had to look around the box to find them. It looks like they should be grabbing something down there, but that doesn't seem to be the case. *Quick edit: I played with them a little bit, and they do snap onto the stabilizing wire, but that didn't solve my problems, or even alleviate them. As you could see above, the stabilizers are either sticking or preventing the spacebar from actually working. It didn't seem to matter where I pressed, or if I pressed harder directly on the switch, but something is very wrong. I wouldn't have cared too much, but I have a set of keycaps I was planning to put on this board, but the stabilizers don't seem compatible with SA profile caps. They just kept falling out of the spacebar. There's also a very audible pinging on just about every key that's pressed. Not the biggest deal, but could get annoying after a while.
The keyboard itself looks really good, the bamboo is nicer in person than the photos. The switches though are the high point, personally. They might be one of my favorite switches, it's just a shame I won't get to use them.
*Edit 3/23: Unfortunately, I couldn't get it working well enough to keep, so I'll be returning this. I'm beyond disappointed, I loved everything but the stabilizers. Hopefully if they do another round of these, they'll just use stabs that are proven.