Anyone feeling absence of cursor keys?

Hello. I am thinking of purchasing a Model01 so an important question (to me):

Is anyone feeling the absence of dedicated cursor keys? I noted some posts here saying that some people reconfigured to WASD-type rather than the default linear configuration but nothing else.

Do people press the palm to the big Fn key and use the right index finger for the cursor? Is it equally as convenient as conventional keyboards after getting used to?

Um this is my first post and this forum’s layout is a bit different than the standard vBulletin or phpBB ones I’ve so far (like the Model01 is different from other keyboards I guess!) so hope I’m not asking this in the wrong place.

Using the OneShot plugin, I find it very easy to double-tap the Fn key to make it “sticky”, turning the “UHJK” keys into an arrow-key cluster until I press Fn again.

The “palm” (fn) keys line up with the second joint of my thumbs (not the knuckle nearest the tip; the one below that), and that’s generally the easiest way to use it, but I often move my hands around, and never rest my wrists or the heel of my hand, so I sometimes use the tip of my thumb, the knuckle near it, or even other fingers. Since it’s not adjacent to other keys, and I mainly use it in combination with keys on the other half of the keyboard (except sometimes keys in the thumb arc), it’s pretty easy to use with almost any part of my hand, since there are no adjacent keys to accidentally press along with it.

I mapped pgup and pgdn to up and down arrow in the QWERTY map, and bound the WASD keys to all four arrows on the FUNCTION map. I am playing with possible locations for left and right arrow on the QWERTY map, but so far it hasn’t been much of an issue.

I’ve also swapped the palm keys to space and backspace, and butterfly is function. With OneShot I double tap the butterfly, and then arrow around. A third tap to the butterfly and I’m back on the QWERTY map.

I only miss them rarely. I’ve moved the arrow keys from their printed position one key to the right so they’re right on home row.

Yes, FN. And I find it even more convenient than dedicated arrow keys for one simple reason: I do not have to leave home row anymore. My hands barely move at all. I hated that the arrow keys were so far away on my old keyboard.

I also remapped the arrow keys from the default setting to something like WASD, only on the right-hand side.

When I first got the keyboard made the right an inverted T and added both Ctrl+Right Arrow and Ctrl+Left arrow keys as I was having issues hitting FN+Ctrl+Arrow and use that so much.

Now that I’m used to the keyboard it’s not too hard to hit the FN+Ctrl combo but I still prefer the dedicated combo keys. For the rest of the thumb cluster combos we’ve got Oneshot which makes FN+(Ctrl Alt or Shift) to be easy to press.

I actually find the Keyboardio cursor keys to be more convenient than on a regular keyboard, because I don’t have to move my hand at all.

I am using the inverted T on the IJKL keys. I mapped home/end to U/O.
I also mapped fn+v/c/x/z to the consumer copy/paste keys, since fn is easier to hold than ctrl.
I have been using my Model01 full time at work for just three days now.

My major issues have been in editing code, that I normally do lightning fast the right hand on arrow keys plus home/end/backspace and the left hand on ctrl/shift and ctrl+v/c/x/z.

With my current layout I got to hold down fn with my palm and operate ctrl+shift+backspace with my thumb while reaching for the v/c/x/z keys with my fingers.

It takes some getting used to, but I am struggling. My thumb is overworked, compared to the classic windows layout.

I really like the idea of dedicated ctrl+left/right arrow. I’ll map those to U/O and move home/end to Y/H.

I also really like the idea of having double fn as a sticky. But I didn’t like sticky for ctrl, shift, alt.

Do you know if there is a good way to make fn sticky on double tap, without getting sticky mode on the other keys?

My layout is here btw: https://github.com/lldata/Model01-Firmware/blob/master/Model01-Firmware.ino

You can make the fn key a one-shot, which lets you double-tap to sticky and just not change the other modifiers key (that is, replace ShiftToLayer(...) with OSL(...)).

You can use the OneShot plugin, and mark the Fn keys as OSL(FUNCTION) instead of ShiftToLayer(FUNCTION), and leave the rest as-is. Mind you, this will also turn the Fn key into a one-shot key, but that shouldn’t be a big deal if you hold it anyway.

Not sure I fully understand. Right now I use OSM for ctrl, alt and shift - but I turned off the double_tap_sticky flag because I didn’t like the sticky mode.

So my question is: can I keep that behaviour, while getting sticky mode on just the fn key?

Ah…in that case, I don’t think so. It looks like the double_tap_sticky is either just on for the plugin or not. As far as I can tell, you’d need to pretty much write your own plugin or fork OneShot to make a version that’s only sticky for layers or something, I guess.

You can also file an issue, and I’ll add a layers-only-sticky flag or something along those lines, the next time I’m poking around OneShot. It would be a fairly small change.

That would be great, and in the meantime, I’m going to turn off stickiness - getting accidental sticky mods has been the only real problem I’ve had with my firmware.

After a couple of weeks, I noticed that I almost never use my right fn key.

So mapping right fn to LockLayer(FUNCTION) I think will give me all the stick layer functionality I want. Getting out of the locked layer works with either fn key.

So no need to fork the OneShot plugin for now.

I don’t find that I miss dedicated cursor keys. Actually, as a Colemak typist, I love that the Model 01 has given me the standard vim cursor keys back!

ie. If you’re typing colemak and you use vim, the standard vim letter-key bindings for directional cursor movement no longer work. You have two choices:

• Change your bindings to something non-standard to preserve the handy home-row positioning of the directional keys (which is the same as the model 01’s Fn-layer)
• Stick with the standard bindings, and accept less-convenient positioning.

The first option incurs the cost of rebinding other vim keys that now clash with the arrow keys; I’ve chosen the second option, since it means I don’t have to rebind things when I use vim or vim-bindings somewhere different. I love that I can now just use the standard vim positioning again without compromise; I find holding the palm key to be trivially easy, and it’s already become second nature.

I know you found a solution already, but I was just re-reading this topic, and another solution came to me. Using Qukeys, you could define both palm keys as a OneShot layer shift on tap, but a LockLayer key on hold. Tap the key quickly, and you activate the function layer until the next keypress, but hold it down a bit longer, and the layer will be locked. The latter guesture would replace the double tap, but the behaviour would be equivalent.

Did you mean hjkl, or does the plugin remap the arrows to uhjk?

Oh, I have changed my layout to move the arrow keys around; the plugin just lets me do the double-tap-to-lock-layer part.