IMHO with the many thumb keys there is no need for more than 3 rows of 10 columns in the main section. Why move your hand out of position to strike, say, a 5 key when a thumb key could put it on the home row? I only use 30 of the 54 keys in the main section; the others are just there to tempt me to put my hand in the wrong place. 
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On the Atreus it gets to be an issue with modified punctuation keys. In Emacs, regexp replacement is bound to Alt-%. On the Atreus that requires three modifiers, function to get to the numbers, shift to get to %, and Alt to modify it. Even with oneshot, that’s an awkward bit of chaining.
Yes, that does sound awkward, Tyler. But you wouldn’t have that problem here, presumably, because you would arrange for a single modifier key to take you straight to the symbols without having to go through the numbers. So {Symbol} with one thumb, {Alt} with the other, and {%} with a finger. You don’t have that flexibility with most keyboards, but you do here.
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Actually, the Atreus uses open firmware also, so you do have that flexibility, and I set up a layer that lets me have symbols without also needing shift. You still need the layer key and the modifier, though.
If anyone is interested, you can see it here. It uses two sets of three layers so I can get consistent behavior (my customized Dvorak) when the OS is set to either Qwerty (bottom left) or to Dvorak (top left, which looks like Qwerty, but swaps some punctuation). The space keys are dual-use, with space on tap and fn1/fn2 when held. I’m probably missing a few things on the fn2 layer, but that’s as far as I had gotten when my Model 01 arrived, and since then… :big grin: It’s currently using tmk; I had just started looking at switching to qmk when I realized what I really wanted to do was run Kaleidoscope on it. That project is backlogged at the moment, though, because RL.
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Thanks, Kajsa and AmigoNico,
I’m spending more time on the Atreus at the time, due to it’s portability. Based on your suggestions, I redid the symbol layer to place all the numbers on the home row, and the symbols for each number on the upper row. The extra symbols, the ones not associated with shifted numbers, mostly fit on the third row. So I can now hit all the letters and symbols with a single modifier, and only need to dip off the three central rows to the awkward fourth row for a handful of things that don’t fit. I find the keys in the lower outside corners difficult to hit on the Atreus, so I’m pleased the Keyboardio has moved those keys to a more central thumb-accessible spot.
Kasja, what command did you use for the space-key dual-use you describe? That sounds like a nice way to get to a third layer. At the moment, I have to get to my symbol layer to access the third layer, which is a bit convoluted for quick key presses.
Since my intention is to use the Keyboardio as my primary desktop keyboard, and the Atreus for travel, I’m hoping to make the Keyboardio layout a superset of the Atreus layout, to minimize the cost of switching boards. So maybe I’ll end up with numbers on both the symbol layer home row and on the top row of the default layer on the Model 01, or maybe that row becomes the new home for arrow keys? Not sure yet, but it’s fun exploring.
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My current Atreus firmware is here
Thanks! It does’t appear in the qmk docs yet, but ACTION_LAYER_TAP_KEY works unaltered on qmk as well, so that was easy.
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