Kenkyo 1.0.0-rc.2 is out with significant improvements

I have made significant changes to my layered, alpha-agnostic keyboard layout. The highlights are:

The extend layer is now bound to holding the spacebar, making it more prominent, reducing pinky strain by not having to hold the caps-lock key anymore and the normalization of home and bottom row modifiers across layers.
The fumbol layer can now be anchored to the spacebar via a layer switch within the extend layer and, more importantly, it can also be activated via bottom row layer modifiers on the main layer, making typing one-off symbols faster and easier.
A couple of useful chords have been introduced for the Esc, Tab, Backspace and Enter keys.
The custom layer was removed for simplicity.

I am currently also working on an tweak that seems to improve the ergonomics of the fumbol layer modifier. I'll trial it for a while and if all goes well I'll merge the PR and make another release candidate.

Posted in: s/keyboards

🗿 argenkiwi [mod]

2025-03-11 · 1 year ago

4 Comments ↓

⛰️ tsukaj · 2025-03-12 at 23:02:

ahhhh… i was interested initially, until i saw home row mods :') i love the concept, but i have never been able to use them without it fudging up my typing (being a dvorak user probably doesn't help)

🗿 argenkiwi [OP/mod] · 2025-03-13 at 08:42:

Please, give it a try. Home row mods have a bad reputation because of too many terrible implementations. With Kanata you can get a very good quality one. I leave them on while on monkeytype.com without issues. The trick is to have a mechanism in place to ignore them while you are typing at speed. Requiring you to press and release the modified key before releasing the modifier also makes it much safer. The only issue you may have is when you want to shift a key in the middle of a typing streak, which can be mitigated finding the right key timing setting.

⛰️ tsukaj · 2025-03-14 at 10:25:

i might give it a shot - i've just always preferred thumb clusters. i already use keyd though, so it shouldn't be too hard to test drive it

🗿 argenkiwi [OP/mod] · 2025-03-16 at 19:11:

I've started using a split with 6 thumb keys last week. So far having one-shot modifiers for fumbol, shift and altgr on those keys seems to be the most useful expansion for the layout while typing. I am keen to explore ways to improve the layout using more thumb keys.