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
- On a Mac or Linux, run the command like this: `./mdloader --first --smarteep`.
- On Windows, run it like this: `mdloader.exe --first --smarteep`
Note that the keyboard will not reboot automatically after this command, so you should unplug it and plug it in again to start it up. For reference, the changes to the loader in this fork are from the pending PR here: https://github.com/Massdrop/mdloader/pull/16Update your keymap to save your settings Now to update the default keymap to save the settings. I created a fork of the latest QMK today and added the required changes to it: https://github.com/ottobonn/qmk_firmware These changes include a new default keymap for the CTRL that saves a bunch of settings to the nonvolatile memory, and some changes based on community work to support SmartEEPROM in QMK, which I have adapted to make a bit more readable. Check out the master branch on this fork of QMK and `make massdrop/ctrl:default_md` to build the new keymap. I have the Drop CTRL and I have tested these steps to persist the settings even after unplugging the keyboard, and it's working great! I am planning to add support for the ALT soon as well. If you need help adapting the CTRL keymap to the ALT, let me know.
- "In your terminal, change to the directory where you downloaded the executable and applet-*.bin file(s)."
- Windows: Run mdloader_windows.exe --first --download FILE_NAME [mine says: "massdrop_ctrl_preset_ctrl__default.bin"] --restart. Replace "FILE_NAME" with the filename of your compiled firmware.
and I should see a summary where the line says: appletfile: applet-flash-samd51j18a.bin but my cmd line still says applet file: applet-mdflash.bin Is this all backwards? Do I need to continue on and build something? obviously i still need to update the keymap. however, my applet file being used isn't even the right one, so should I be doing something else first before I even flash a new bin?