ErgoDox VS komorebi

https://www.ergodox.io/, been around forever now.

Closest split PCB based design with a Kinesis Advantage thumb cluster, I know of, is the Ergodox Would need tenting to emulate the keywells. Lovingly design and print a case with tenting legs for it? 🤔

Should be in here somewhere: https://github.com/Ergodox-io/ErgoDox

> Is ZSA's build known to have latency issues compared to QMK?

ZSA is using a patched QMK - they even let you download the exact source for each firmware build they make for you. At the time when I switched to vanilla QMK (that was already some years ago), ZSA were veeery far behind master; running the latest QMK release fixed a couple of issues for me (like hotplugging the halves), so I guess there could be other improvements? No idea really.

> Would a faster microprocessor help

In the MCU world, latency and clock speed can have a very linear relationship - until they suddenly don't. The microcontroller's job is very simple really: scan the key matrix at a certain frequency, perform key debouncing, compare the current state with the previous, and craft a USB HID packet with key press/release events.

So having twice the clock speed could theoretically let you scan twice as often, so it might let you cut the latency in half. Except we have those pesky physics getting in our way! For simplicity let's assume we don't have split halves (where there's an extra serial connection slowing things down); I'm no EE so I only grasp these concepts at the surface level, but signals take time to propagate, and long traces on the PCB (and cables too) have a tiny bit of their own capacitance. (Capacitors are like really fast, really tiny batteries - but they still take a tiny amount of time to charge and discharge, which does all sorts of interesting things to high-frequency signals.)

On top of that, the electrical connection that the pieces of metal are making inside the switch, are never perfect at the exact instant the switch is supposed to (de)register: a couple electrons might start jumping over the air even before contact is made, and the physical connection is subject to normal wear, amplifying the "edge case" effect over its lifetime - which all together means we have to actually spend a certain amount of time "looking" at the state of the switch, to let it settle and make sure we got it right.

We end up spending so much time letting physics do its job that in a trivial firmware, the MCU is actually spending a significant amount of time... just sleeping. Which means we were later able to cram all sorts of madness like individual RGB lightning or status displays, and never decreased the poll rate.

Where would these 40ms come from then? Well I wouldn't get near the problem without an oscilloscope, and unfortunately I don't have one.

> I'm just starting to get into custom keyboards.

Then I recommend studying the original ErgoDox firmware & build instructions! It's extremely straightforward compared to a beast like QMK, which actually uses a whole RTOS.

https://www.ergodox.io/; https://github.com/benblazak/ergodox-firmware

Hi! Does anyone here have some experience playing age on an ergodox? I usually move the right part out of the way so that I can have more space for the mouse (it is actually great for things like FPS because the mouse hand is in a very natural position), but the default hotkeys force me to move my left hand across both sides, making it hard to actually hit the key without looking. I've been only using control groups 1-5 due to this, which is less than optimal.

The closest open source keyboard you'll get next to the Moonlander is probably the ErgoDox that it's heavily inspired from.

I love seeing whenever this is (re)posted.

This article had such a huge impact on my life and led to me creating many pieces of software[1][2][3] that were hyper-specific to myself and my needs at the time, which also later found an audience in others who think and work in ways similar to me.

[1]: https://notado.app - a "content-first" internet bookmarking and highlighting service which has been my second brain since 2020 after growing frustrated with Instapaper, Pinboard and Readwise. Eventually I expanded this to allow for RSS feed publishing on specific topics in an attempt to solve the "firehose" problem when following other peoples' bookmarks/shares, and at the end of last year I added what is now my most used feature of image generation from highlights for sharing on image-first/text-hostile social media platforms.

[2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi - tiling window manager for Windows. There wasn't really anything fit for purpose on Windows when I started, and I was too spoiled by bspwm and yabai on Linux and macOS that I just had to write something before I could become a truly productive Windows user. I'm astonished that this now has 50k+ downloads.

[3]: https://kulli.sh - I use this to aggregate comments from HN/Reddit/Lemmy/Lobsters on an article I'm interests in in one place to read. This has helped me find some interesting niche communities on Reddit and Lemmy who share and discuss things I'm interested in that I otherwise wouldn't have found.

It's very heartening to see all of the stories here.

I've put the last few years of my life into working on komorebi, a tiling window manager for Windows[1], https://notado.app, a content-first social bookmarking service, and https://kulli.sh, a "bring your own links" comment aggregator which shows you comments from hn, reddit, lobsters, lemmy etc. on an article all in one place.

Unfortunately I was laid off after 5 years with the same company last month, and nobody seems to care about any of these projects when it comes to recruiting. There are people who use them that have reached out to me very kindly offering to make referrals, but the job market values LeetCode more than shipping real code these days.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

In the spirit of full disclosure, I wanted to share that throughout the changeset of this refactor which included 11 files changed, 597 insertions, and 133 deletions (full diff here), a single regression was found due to a logic error I introduced.

The two biggest tiling window manager projects for Windows are komorebi and GlazeWM. Komorebi is probably faster and more resource efficient since it is written in Rust, but I stick with Glaze for now since it has a cool status bar built in I like.

Not too many options for Windows OS, but this one looks decent: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi.

It's been a while since I last posted here. Since my last post, komorebi passed 3k stars on GitHub, became the most starred Windows twm of all time (surpassing bug.n!) and crossed 20k downloads.