And surprisingly it’s going pretty well. I’m late to the fad I think, but only a few weeks ago I thought it was bananas to not have arrow keys. Then I learned about the whole tiny-keyboard world, and decided to go for it.
The keyboard I’m using is a Ferris Sweep, which as free and open hardware you may produce yourself.
At the moment I have 9 layers, 7 of them in frequent use. The learning process has been surprisingly not bad. And using QMK I have tweaked the key map a lot already.
If you use a computer a lot, say for your job, it’s worth optimizing how you interact with it.
How long have you been using yours? That’s great that it’s almost endgame. It’s still all new to me.
My keymap is a heavily modified form of the default keymap, but essentially the same in spirit.
I been using it as my daily driver for 2 years. But I also have 3 other boards with 36 keys so all said and done I’ve been on 35% split boards for maybe three years.
If you have looked into it, check out the miryoku layout: https://github.com/manna-harbour/miryoku
He designed it for 36 keys but it can be adapted to 34. The mouse emulation layer really isn’t needed. I have a few other layouts saved somewhere I can send you too, Including mine of course lol.
Thanks! I’ll keep those layouts in mind. I did a fair amount of research into what layouts are popular for these 35% boards, and I did see the miryoku layout. At the moment I’m taking inspiration from all the ideas and basically coming up with my own map that makes sense for myself and my workflow.
The miryoku one looks really well considered and maybe I’ll go in that direction eventually. My current opinion is that modifiers make most sense on the thumb keys, and layers under the home row. There are two reasons for this. First and most obvious is that an accidental modifier keypress is more destructive than an accidental layer activation. Second, there are a fixed number of modifier keys (4 if I’m counting right) and they map cleanly to the fixed number of thumb keys I have available (also 4). With the miryoku layout I am vertically constrained; the number of layers I can have is determined by the number of thumb keys. I expect in the future I will add more layers for macros, and it’s more complicated to do that if I’m already at capacity for my thumb keys where I toggle my layers.
Totally forgot to reply last night. I was dead tired when I got home.
Keymap db: https://keymapdb.com/?keyCount=1-36&stagger=columnar
roux-34(mine): https://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/66f1904eee126cbfe17ad4e6011db06b
Most people go with homerow mods with these boards but because of misfires, some do bottom row mods. What I did was set the time to trigger long press for my weaker fingers a bit longer so I get way fewer misfires that way. My only concern with using homerow for layer keys is that you have to use twice as many layers but most micro controllers can handle that these days. If that works for you then keep doing it. The beauty of QMK is that you can make it however you want. In fact, QMK is imo one of the most remarkable examples of open source software.
Something else I might suggest is look at flashing the Vial version of QMK. It’s has a GUI that let’s you change keys on the fly and without having to reflash the firmware each time. It’s an amazing addition to QMk for this very reason.
I looked into vial a little bit, looks very convenient, although the Mac version is in beta and it doesn’t recognize my device for some reason. I’ll try it again in a few months.
I’ve been pondering the miryoku layout all day. I can see benefits of doing home row mods instead of thumb row. The main benefit is the simplicity of a mod key always being on the same finger of either hand e.g. ring finger always alt. That makes it more predictable and less idiosyncratic than the setup I have right now. Though, it still has limitations on the number of layers like I mentioned before, but maybe I can make it work. If I switch to that approach I’ll let you know.
So homerow mods are gonna be hard to really get down if you aren’t a very precise typer. That is why my ring and pinky finger keys are set to a longer trigger time than my middle and index. I still get some misfires occasionaly(mainly Ctri+H for some reason) but it’s so little that it’s pretty manageable. My number layer, function layer, and my nav layer all have Super,Alt,Shift,Ctrl on the opposite side to allow for for stuff like shifting a number key(so like 7 becomes $ on the fly). I might also suggest looking into “sticky mods”. I believe callum uses this.
So I just installed callum after a week using my default map… good improvement in accuracy in the first five or so minutes. Don’t have much time to practice since it’s very late, but I will give it the paces tomorrow at work. Thanks for the recommendation!
Also I’m very happy about it because I managed to get my LCD module to work with the callum keymap, and I got callum to work from that new qmk userspace feature. Still a little surprised I got it to work lol.
I just realized that Callum uses OSM(One Shot Mods) instead of bottom row. Idk which layout uses bottom row I guess. I’m glad you are grooving with it more. I love this stuff but don’t get very many chances to talk about it.
I was actually considering giving Callum a shot but ended up making my own layout. Just as an aside but my symbol layout was inspiired almost completely by this blog post: https://getreuer.info/posts/keyboards/symbol-layer/index.html
I use Colemak-dh and the layout was designed with inner and outer finger rolls in mind along with lowering the amount of single finger bi- and trigrams. So my programmy layer also uses that philosophy. I spent way too long designing my layout and no one to yap about it rofl.