Practical question about living with 40% split (+ custom keeb identification)

• qmk_firmware

  1,587 17,079 10.0 C

  Open-source keyboard firmware for Atmel AVR and Arm USB families

  

In short - yes. It is a hindrance. After around a year of progressively reducing my layout I still haven't regained my full typing speed. BUT! I type a little bit slower on an ortho, but my accuracy is incomparably better. I make less typos, and my hands are much more relaxed. My speed is still around 80-100 WPM on monkeytype, so it's not like it slowed me down to a crawl. I was able to get back to productive speeds after a week or two. I'm currently at 38 keys - 5x3 alphas + 4 thumb buttons each side for around two months or so. Sometimes I mess up layers and end up inputting something else than I wanted. Mod combos are a bit of cognitive overhead, but otherwise I don't struggle writing code. Brackets and parenthesis are no bigger struggle than on traditional keyboard. You just have to experiment with creating your layout. I try to use associations like having symbol layer mirror the layout of traditional keyboard, or having different kinds of braces, parenthesis etc. next to each other. When you use a symbol often enough it quickly becomes muscle memory and you just fire it up with no hesitation. I think first you should research different kinds of layout mechanics like tap-dance, home row mods etc. Personally, I haven't tried tap-dance, which everyone recommends, because I didn't find it appealing, but I found callum layout mod layer shockingly easy to adjust to.

• kmonad

  33 667 8.5 Haskell

  Discontinued An advanced keyboard manager [Moved to: https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad] (by david-janssen)

  

Similar features are supported by several applications such as KMonad. Basically the only reason to prefer a firmware solution is if you often switch systems (physical computers, virtualization, remote desktop) and keeping more of your configuration in the keyboard is simpler ... and I suppose if you run into latency issues with features like tap/hold.

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