this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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ErgoMechKeyboards

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Ergonomic, split and other weird keyboards

Rules

Keep it ergo

Posts must be of/about keyboards that have a clear delineation between the left and right halves of the keyboard, column stagger, or both. This includes one-handed (one half doesn't exist, what clearer delineation is that!?)

i.e. no regular non-split¹ row-stagger and no non-split¹ ortholinear²

¹ split meaning a separation of the halves, whether fixed in place or entirely separate, both are fine.
² ortholinear meaning keys layed out in a grid

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[–] Aldoo 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Unless I am mistaken, keyd is a kernel level input remapper (like kmonad and kanata). So it is a lower level component: even if you use keyd, xkb will still be there, downstream. The situation would be roughly the same as with xmodmap... except it won't even be enough!

Indeed, this method consists in mapping scan codes to other scan codes. At this level, there is not the notion that a key produces a character yet. Hence concretely, kernel level input remapping (like QMK, btw) cannot be used to map a key to a character that is not already declared in a higher level component (usually in xkb or xcompose, but it can also be a another component using X11 API, such as xmodmap, for instance).

Edit: to make it more clear, in the end, it is the application who decides what character should be displayed. Typically, for doing so, the application relies on libraries from its toolkit, which implement either X11 or Wayland text input protocols; using standard keycode-to-character translation libraries (i.e., most notably, libxkb). To add new characters in a keymap, these characters need, in the end, to be produceable as the output of these libraries.