How To Design A GMK Keycap Set: An Introduction

If you watched Star Wars for the first time, without seeing images of the Empire’s perfectly spaced thousands of goose-stepping minions in spotless white-lacquered armor. If you didn’t see the fleets of black and grey tie-fighters, the immaculately designed star cruisers, the evil moon-shaped flagship… you wouldn’t know that the rebels were rebels. After all, rebels don’t look like rebels if they don’t have something to contrast them against. They just look like normal people. That’s probably why when you see Luke Skywalker, Han Solo or Finn (all rebels) dressed in stormtrooper garb, they somehow seem even more rebellious then they were before. It’s not what they’re wearing, it’s how they wear it. Dirty, scuffed, broken. Helmet missing or askew. An out of place, beat up weapon slung diagonally across their body. It’s the simple act of defacing the uniform that identifies them in our mind as counter-cultural. Funnily enough, it works in reverse. To the dismay of...

Welcome back to this series where we’re designing kick-ass keymaps! After covering basics like how good/bad QWERTY is, the power of layers and the potential of custom keymaps, we took the first real steps in designing your tailor-fit keymap by looking into some options for compiling a corpus in general and also with a more useful personal corpus in mind. Quick recap: in this context, corpus is simply a fancy name for a big chunk of text. Today, we’re going to analyze your corpus (or pretty much any text if you haven't done your homework yet) and discuss some basic language statistics along with common metrics that can be used to quickly evaluate a keymap, and also to compare layouts. This is the next logical step in our journey if you're aiming to craft the optimal keymap for yourself. Character/bigram/trigram frequencies To begin with, let's examine the character frequencies in our corpus. The occurrence of different letters can vary significantly not only between...

Making your keyboard work for you! When shopping for a new keyboard you may have heard that you want to have a keyboard that is compatible with QMK, VIA, or VIAL. These are three different programs that allow you to modify the assigned keys on a keyboard. This is one of the major advantages of using a custom mechanical keyboard and one that I feel is criminally underused. Making small adjustments to your layers can allow you to tune your keyboard to your exact specifications. For example, I always swap the position of left control and caps lock. I’ve always felt that caps lock was a waste of such a valuable space. For those of you that read some of my earlier articles, you’ll know that my first mechanical keyboard was a Happy Hacking Keyboard. As you’ll see later on, my personal layouts are heavily inspired by this keyboard, even going so far as to mapping my backspace to the pipe key on nearly every single physical layout, yes including tenkeyless. Today, I hope you can take away...

I don’t think this is an article. I’m pretty sure it’s the beginning of a book. The "technology" section of every thrift store is a potential treasure trove. Swap meets, estate sales... they're the same. I honestly enjoy sifting through stacks of typewriters, radios, turntables and dusty old keyboards... hunting for treasure. That's what has led me to ask my friends in the hobby a pair of simple but nuanced questions… what’s your dream thrift store find and what’s your holy grail? It turns out, that for many, that’s the same question. For a lot of people in this hobby, finding the perfect board for you happens at some point, and rather than staring at your collection of boards on the wall, or continuing to buy keyboards until your room looks like Wall-E’s trailer… Instead, mature keyboard hobbyists tend to do a number of things: Sell/trade artisan keycaps Purchase keycap sets Sell or trade rare/nice (and sometimes new) keyboards to keep things fresh Most of us haven’t...

Welcome back to our series on designing custom keymaps! After looking into how good/bad QWERTY is, the power of layers, and the potential of custom keymaps, last time we took the first real step by examining your options for compiling a corpus. As a recap: The corpus is simply a big chunk of text. We use this collection of textual data, often a single text file, to characterize your typing habits (calculating various language statistics), and feed it directly or indirectly as an input into layout optimization algorithms – to find the optimal keymap for you! Today we’ll expand on this idea by exploring your options if, like me, you prefer a personalized corpus rather than grabbing some general (and mostly irrelevant) data available online. Image 1: Letter frequencies – the most basic use of corpora – in this very post We've seen that a well-crafted, personalized corpus plays a key role in determining the outcome of the optimization process. We've also explored...

Figure 1: This is the keyboard of someone (0range) who clearly knows how to ask proper questions. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been lurking around the channels of a couple of different entry level keyboard forums and I have to admit that the experience is quite bleak. I’m not saying this because of “toxicity” or people being given wrong information, rather I see so many people’s questions going unanswered… and to be honest they’re kind of to blame for it. While I recognize that not everyone coming freshly into the keyboard space enters it with the same level of inquisitiveness that I did when I first joined back in 2017, these questions going unanswered really feel way under-thought or over-thought compared to where I was. On one hand, you get questions like this: What is best gaming keyboard? And on the other hand, you get questions like this: Hi, there everyone! I am just now starting to look into mechanical keyboards as an avid gamer and I need some help in...

If you watched Star Wars for the first time, without seeing images of the Empire’s perfectly spaced thousands of goose-stepping minions in spotless white-lacquered armor. If you didn’t see the fleets of black and grey tie-fighters, the immaculately designed star cruisers, the evil moon-shaped flagship… you wouldn’t know that the rebels were rebels. After all, rebels don’t look like rebels if they don’t have something to contrast them against. They just look like normal people. That’s probably why when you see Luke Skywalker, Han Solo or Finn (all rebels) dressed in stormtrooper garb, they somehow seem even more rebellious then they were before. It’s not what they’re wearing, it’s how they wear it. Dirty, scuffed, broken. Helmet missing or askew. An out of place, beat up weapon slung diagonally across their body. It’s the simple act of defacing the uniform that identifies them in our mind as counter-cultural. Funnily enough, it works in reverse. To the dismay of...

Welcome back to this series where we’re designing kick-ass keymaps! After covering basics like how good/bad QWERTY is, the power of layers and the potential of custom keymaps, we took the first real steps in designing your tailor-fit keymap by looking into some options for compiling a corpus in general and also with a more useful personal corpus in mind. Quick recap: in this context, corpus is simply a fancy name for a big chunk of text. Today, we’re going to analyze your corpus (or pretty much any text if you haven't done your homework yet) and discuss some basic language statistics along with common metrics that can be used to quickly evaluate a keymap, and also to compare layouts. This is the next logical step in our journey if you're aiming to craft the optimal keymap for yourself. Character/bigram/trigram frequencies To begin with, let's examine the character frequencies in our corpus. The occurrence of different letters can vary significantly not only between...