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ErgoMechKeyboards
Ergonomic, split and other weird keyboards
Rules
Keep it ergo
Posts must be of/about keyboards that have a clear delineation between the left and right halves of the keyboard, column stagger, or both. This includes one-handed (one half doesn't exist, what clearer delineation is that!?)
i.e. no regular non-split¹ row-stagger and no non-split¹ ortholinear²
¹ split meaning a separation of the halves, whether fixed in place or entirely separate, both are fine.
² ortholinear meaning keys layed out in a grid
No Spam
No excessive posting/"shilling" for commercial purposes. Vendors are permitted to promote their products/services but keep it to a minimum and use the [vendor] flair. Posts that appear to be marketing without being transparent about it will be removed.
No Buy/Sell/Trade
This subreddit is not a marketplace, please post on r/mechmarket or other relevant marketplace.
Some useful links
- EMK wiki
- Split keyboard compare tool
- Compare keycap profiles Looking for another set of keycaps - check this site to compare the different keycap profiles https://www.keycaps.info/
- Keymap database A database with all kinds of keymap layouts - some of them fits ergo keyboards - get inspired https://keymapdb.com/
I think most people map their keyboards to something based upon US QWERTY and set their input language in the OS to their language layout. that means no faffing around with unicode. e.g. QMK's
KC_SEMI
is;
in English (United States) locale butå
in a nordic layout. There's not really a fully portable way to achieve it all on-keyboard because the means to input unicode differs between operating systems. However, you can use QMK's unicode support but you will also need to include some keys that toggle between which OS you're plugged into to have it work.For portability you are better off using whatever the most widely-used means of typing your given characters are across OSs, so if Linux/Mac/Windows all have the same deadkey combination for ë and ê on their built-in AZERTY, use a macro that types that. As for æ and œ then yeah, you might be shit out of luck with a properly agnostic portable system. Unicode stuff, as I said above, is not OS agnostic so you will have to toggle a setting based on which OS you are using at the time. I don't think there's a way to detect that from the host unless there is a hueristic I'm unaware of.
Good luck, I hope you come up with a low-friction solution.
They do actually. Macro it is then.
For the ligatures, I might actually map AltGr-O and AltGr-A to some keys and Alt+0156 and Alt+0230 to adjacent keys, so there is no need to maintain layer spaghetti just for two (useful but relatively uncommon) characters.
A whole new can of worms can be opened too with accented, uppercase letters.
I'm gonna scale my ambitions down. Let's not be more royalist than the king as we say in French, I will aim for parity with the AZERTY keyboard and we'll see from there.