I think its pretty neat! I’m still trying to get used to it. The mouse cursor movement is a bit too fast for my taste, but that can be probably customized in the firmware. The concept of teleporting the cursor to different quadrants of the screen is even better (albeit stranger). My main gripe is that it doesnt support multiple monitor setups, but that too can be most likely fixed one way or another.
Depending on what I’ll end up liking more, I might end up removing the other mouse control keys to free them up for some other unrelated custom key stuff. The FN layer is pretty crowded as is.
Edit: I wonder what captchas operating on mouse movement will have to say about this.
I like the mouse controls very much, although I also would have liked a little trackpoint or mini joystick close to my thumb or index finger. (But I understand why it didn’t happen on the Model01.)
My tip: reconfiguring the layout to either activate the mouse controls together with NumLock or implement a separate ScrollLock. For me, having to press Fn all the time was not ideal. Plus it frees up a lot of space on the Fn layer. YMMV of course.
Also, I’m thinking about rearranging the keys so that I have movement with ESDF and the clicks with W3R.
I’ve yet to grow accustomed to the mouse warping keys. Currently I’m forcing myself to give them a try, it wasn’t love on first sight. Maybe I’ll get used to the strangeness of it.
I think what you’re looking for is a LockLayer(FUNCTION) key instead of / in addition to the existing ShiftToLayer(FUNCTION) keys. Alternately, if you want mouse keys on a separate layer, you could make a MOUSEKEYS layer (or FUNCTION2, or whatever) and have a LockLayer(MOUSEKEYS) key somewhere. Just a suggestion.
A separate layer that get’s locked in was exactly what I meant.
I just (ab)used NumLock as a quick and dirty solution because I was in a hurry to start using my Model01.
Once you start thinking about extra layers, the fun doesn’t stop. A friend of mine would probably kill for a music layer to send customized input to his synthetizer and I wouldn’t be surprised, if someone will implement games that you can play directly on the Model01 on a special layer.
If I have to use the mouse (I tend to avoid it), it’s usually for more than just a quick point and click. I don’t like having to hold down modifier keys for long. (For good reason: I have Emacs pinkie and need to watch myself so it does not progress to full blown RTI.) As I said: YMMV. It really depends on how you use the mouse and for what.
But for quick point and clicks the mouse via Fn is definetly nice. Maybe I’ll end up having both. Or I’ll give that FnLock a try. Maybe I can get the Model01 to lock Fn in if I press a modifier together with Fn, that way it would be possible to use the mouse for short periods with Fn and for longer periods with FnLock.
Let’s see wether the Model01 can distinguish between pressing just one Fn key and pressing both at the same time. That would be a neat way to enter and leave FnLock. I was already planing to try the same for CapsLock.
IIRC it can’t. However, you could map one of them to ShiftToLayer(FOO) where FOO is a layer of all ___ keys (that is, transparent keys) except for the other Fn key, which could be LockLayer(FUNCTION) on that layer.
Right, my bad. I guess I meant that it can’t tell pressing one ShiftToLayer(FUNCTION) key from pressing two at once (again, iirc). But of course you could map the two Fn buttons on the Model01 to different keys (as alluded to in my overly-brief explanation above), and then the keyboard could totally tell them apart. Thanks for the clarification.
Because it’s a little far away from both the ring and pinckie fingers?
… Well, if your language has more than 26 letters to the alphabet, you can’t get too picky about what you consider reachable and what not. At least as long as you keep to standard keyboard layouts (that really don’t make any sense in any language, I know). Guess I’ll have to have another go at Dvorak.
I’m pretty sure you could do that too, with a little coding. (Meaning, both function keys normally act like ShiftToLayer(FUNCTION), but when both pressed, it does ShiftToLayer(FOO) for some other FOO.)
If you’re comfortable with coding, here’s approximately how I’d do it. You’d start by making both Fn keys instances of a macro. When pressed, you check if the other one is currently pressed (maybe there’s a static flag in the macro function), and if it is, return MACRO(Tr(LockLayer(FOO))), but if it isn’t, return MACRO(Tr(LockLayer(FUNCTION))). Then on release, unlock the layers as appropriate.
If you find it reachable, run with it. (FWIW, the four buttons we think are a little too far to touch type are Prog, LED, Any and Num.) You could certainly consider moving punctuation off the default layer.
As you (and everybody else) starts to figure out ‘good’ layouts on the Model 01 for various languages and use cases, we’re going to want to start showcasing them That was something we decided was going to end up much better if it was figured out by native typists of the languages, rather than by the two of is.
I absolutely agree about having native speakers/keyboardists develop layers, and getting tables of keycodes onto the wiki for the extended character sets will help with that.
I found the mouse acceleration prohibitive - but I find that’s the case for nipple mice also. Any form of mouse that isn’t actually a mouse seems to break the intuitive hand-eye coordination part of my brain…
The mouse click alone has been kinda nice when I’m doing, say, typing on screen 1 and have to periodically click the same button on screen 2. The movement keys haven’t been as useful as I hoped.
That was something we decided was going to end up much better if it was figured out by native typists of the languages, rather than by the two of is.