Since putting together my ErgoMax a month back, I found myself feeling increasingly less keen to get back to productive stuff, which in my case is programming.
Yesterday I had a moment of clarity on the irritation that I couldn’t previously quite put my finger on — it was the steady hassle of having to fiddle with layer shifting and other mod keys such as shift or command, to type in even just a few lines of code.
How do all the programmers deal with having to constantly key in “, [] and {}, sometimes with cmd, ctrl etc keys held down, on boards without dedicated keys for them?
I ended up with pretty much my own entire layout. For the most part, I don't use layers, but instead use pairs of keys for symbols, numbers, etc. I also kept things largely where they are on a traditional keyboard, so that I'm not fighting against several decades of muscle memory.
The main issue with what I've done is that I'm kind of pushing past the limits of combining features with QMK. I use pairs of keys as modifiers (my left shift is 'E'+'D' for example), this key pressed is also '3'. If I roll on numbers, I end up with stuck modifiers. I've gotten fairly used to it, but it still hits me from time to time.
I do use a layer for things like cursor keys, though.
save