(The same argument could be made about the QWERTY layout, but I’m not here to get into keyboard debates today.) Staggered keyboards, it can be argued, are glued to the past - keys are staggered up and to the side, which allowed for mechanical typewriter arms to avoid catching one another as the arms clanged the physical paper.
Lastly, ortholinear - you can go down long rabbit holes on whether the ortholinear grid key layout is superior to the age-old staggered key layout we all know and love. With Tap Dance, the Planck EZ went from being a non-starter 40% keyboard to an “I really want to try this” 40% keyboard. With this in mind, I immediately viewed that right-hand Enter key as a viable Tap Dance candidate that could reintroduce the right shift key to the Planck keyboard. Similar to QMK‘s Quantum functionality, a single tap would produce one result, a hold would present a second result, a double tap would produce a third result, and a tap-and-hold would produce a fourth result. With Tap Dance, you can program a single key to perform four different functions. Recently however, “Tap Dance” was introduced for the Planck EZ. In theory, the Planck looked enticing, but I could never imagine the mental overhead in dealing with a single shift key. The idea of holding down the left shift key for all keys seemed impossible and certainly didn’t seem to be worth the finger gymnastics required. It was the lack of a right shift key that scared me away from the Planck keyboard when I first started down the mechanical keyboard path a year or so ago. This layout is incredibly unique, even jettisoning the right shift key to make room for the enter key.
Planck keyboards are often bought as a build-it-yourself kit, but you can purchase a pre-built Planck EZ from ZSA, the makers of the popular Ergodox EZ mechanical keyboard. The Planck is a specific type of keyboard - created by Jack Humbert - that sports an ortholinear key grid (rather than the standard staggered key layout found on 99% of other keyboards) and a 40% layout. So while a 40% board omits the top number and function rows, number pad and arrow keys, and other navigational keys, you can still program capabilities into the keyboard to reach these functions in a small and light package. To start off I added the default Change caps_lock to command+control+option+shift modifications.I’ve officially gone off the deep-end - after a year or two of trying out different mechanical keyboards, I’ve made the deepest of dives into the world of 40% keyboards.Ĥ0% keyboards are as their name sounds - they sport 40% of the keys you’d find on a regular full-size keyboard and rely heavily on programmable layers to meet all key function needs. First step for me was to undo this in the Keyboard settings of macOS, to have a sane default state.
Caps lock wasd karabiner elements pro#
I have been using caps_lock as esc ever since I got a MacBook Pro with a touchbar. You can add most of these snippets to your ~/.config/karabiner/karabiner.json under $.plex_les. This is a summary of my current system and the most important configurations in Karabiner Elements.
Caps lock wasd karabiner elements windows#
In my current setup I use it to move windows around, to use ijkl as arrow keys, to launch all kind of tools and programs.
Then you can use this key in all sorts of other tools to define easy to reach keyboard shortcuts without having to be a finger acrobat. But looking a bit more into it, quickly led me to the idea of a Hyper Key: Effectively this means mapping caps_lock (or any other key you don't need) to simulate the hold of essentially all modifiers ( ctrl, option, command and shift). I put it to use to remap the right ctrl key to option to fix that Keychron K2 flaw. When I researched the whole keyboard topic, I quickly stumbled over Karabiner Elements: A tool to customize the keyboard handling in macOS.
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