dactyl-manuform-keymap VS qmk_firmware

Regarding chording, you might find inspiration in the chording schemes in Ikcelaks’ Magic Sturdy, the Ardux project, and precondition's "steno-lite" combos.

I spent most of the last 2 years using variants of this but more recently I’ve switch from home row mods to one shot mods and modifier positions similar to Xah. https://github.com/precondition/dactyl-manuform-keymap

Something that made a big difference for me was home row mods. If you can use QMK to embed ctrl, shift, alt, gui into ‘long press’ on the home row it will reduce strain from overusing the pinky finger. After about 1 year of using a variation of this setup I think home row mods reducing pinky finger strain has been the most noticeable improvement although there are many more benefits to switching to something like this dactyl manuform kb. https://github.com/precondition/dactyl-manuform-keymap

How did I arrive to this keymap? It's been a journey. I used home row mods for a few months. This felt great, but with my sloppy typing I routinely got false triggers (despite IGNORE_MOD_TAP_INTERRUPT) and struggled to get my typing speed much above 60 wpm. ​In an attempt to reduce false triggers, I wrote my own (not very good) mod-tap implementation, then realized this is a hard problem. I tried Precondition "steno lite" (see the system of combos in his keymap), and worked through some lessons from Zack Brown's excellent Learn Plover site to learn a little about real steno. I've dabbled with RSTHD and BEAKL15 before going back to Dvorak.

I just purchased a Dactyl Manuform 5X6 from Cheap Dactyl, with a set of keycaps printed to my own map. It's got a ProMicro atMega32u4 (from what I can tell), and came flashed to a default layout. It works correctly with this layout. My keymap, hex, and layout (since adjusted) can be found here.

randomly thrown in letters.

uses default dactyl manuform 4x5 wiring.

uses this keymap