Keymap wizardry: Typing out the Harry Potter saga
Typing out all the Harry Potter books would be crazy, right? What would be the point? Seems like a weird flex even by keyboard enthusiast standards. Yep, that's right. Typing it out once makes no sense. That's why I'm going to type out the books a few million times! For the benefit of humanity and especially of you, fellow keymap wizards. This is a demonstration of the power of alternative/custom layouts. Given the huge extent of this topic, we can barely scratch the surface here so consider this write-up a mere teaser. Imagine you are an aspiring writer with a brilliant idea, just about to start typing out your magnum opus, staring at a yet empty document on your screen. Cursor blinking, annoying orphan relatives locked up in the cupboard under the stairs. Your story, about a young boy who ends up saving the world, is quite complete. You "just" have to type out heaps of your manuscripts and notes: about 6.5 million keystrokes. Everything is prepared for the...
Jun 4, 2024
On my imaginary top list of the most useful keyboard features, tweaks and hacks, SpaceFN would deserve a podium finish for sure. But what makes it so special? I will list its benefits below, but can state right at this point that the SpaceFN concept, setting up your space key as a layer switch when held, is clearly one of the most useful tweaks in the keyboard hobby. Why? How? Let me explain it so you can start boosting your productivity right away. If you already use it, you may read this article as a self-justification. If you heard about SpaceFN but haven't tried it yet, let me convince you and show you some implementations. And if you're not sure about what SpaceFN is, read this write-up because it may change your life - well, at least that part you spend in front of monitors. ...and believe me, running a blog called kbd.news makes it pretty much unavoidable to get and test new keyboards every week. Loosely recreating my custom keymap and being able to use an additional SpaceFN layer is crucial, especially when I have to revert to the standard layout and horizontal staggering after using split keyboards. Well, as a matter of fact, I don't even have to set up SpaceFN in this case. Because I find it so essential that a handy tool is running on my PC taking care of this for me, automatically. I do think it would be a real blunder if you missed this incredible feature, so do yourself a favor and read on. SpaceFN history Of course I'm not the one who came up with this concept. The first useful post on the subject I came across was probably this geekhack thread by spiceBar, from 2013, advocating this layout:
KMonad is there for Linux (with the recommendation of Matthias Goffette). Example layout So you’ve set up SpaceFN in Via/VIAL/QMK. Well done. The original idea back in 2013 materialized as a semi-standardized SpaceFN layer. Still, I like to call it a concept, because as already told, you can and should put whatever you want on your SpaceFN layer.