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
Having been into mechanical keyboard for a couple of years now I have my share of small keyboards. In fact just about all of them are Planck based and one thing I learned quick about myself is that I could not live without arrows. Before my conversion to mechanical boards I would have laughed at the very thought of a 1u backspace or not having a standard T configuration for navigating (I also would have known what 1u was). For me, vi style arrow keys. I'm still not 100% there, but it seams like the way to go for me.
So here is my topic: