I have had my Atreus for about 3 months now and I have finally settled on my preferred set of key mappings and thought I would share them. Suggestions for improvements are certainly welcome.
To understand the rationale for my mappings, realize that I spend a lot of time writing writing code and using Excel. So my key priority was to setup up a good numeric pad on Layer 1, which allowed me to do just about everything numeric with the right hand.
Layer 0: Characters
I started with the standard Atreus layout and made the following changes:
- Swapped space and backspace keys. When using the numeric pad, I wanted to be able to backspace easily, and swapping them allowed that.
- The equivalent of a NumLock key, which is the “MoveTo 1” key. This allows me to stay in numeric mode until I hit this again, which brings me back to Layer 0.
- Allow shifting into Layer 1 temporarily by holding down either F or J. This is perfect for quickly mixing numbers and characters.
- Placed most commonly used keys next to space/backspace keys. For me, these keys are Shift, Tab, Enter, and shifting to Layer 3, which has cursor functions.
- Placed all the control keys {Ctrl, Windows, Alt} on the bottom row the of the left hand. These keys are never overriden across layers, and therefore work the same way in every layer.
- The Ctrl key at the lower left feels very natural, as this is where this is on most keyboards. Also works very well with Cut/Copy/Paste.
- I can also shift into uppercase using the “z” and “/” characters by holding them down. I had this exclusively at first, but was getting some typos and added a dedicated Shift key. Now that I have that, I might get rid of these.
- Holding down the lower right shifts into Layer 2, which has the Fn keys.
Layer 1: Numbers and Symbols
Layer 1 is focused upon creating a great numeric pad using just the right hand. Note that I have everything I need here in order to create full arithmetic expresssions here, including parens. The left hand contains easier access to the symbols above the numbers, and brackets. Note that I very explicitly did not overwrrite the characters Z,X,C, and V, as I wanted them to work seamlessly with Ctrl.
Layer 2: Function Keys
Layer 2 is accessed by holding down the lower right corner key from Layer 0. It is primarily for the FN keys. But I have also mapped the Layer 0 backspace key to Delete on Layer 2. So if I want Delete instead of Backspace, I simply hold down the lower right corner key.
Layer 3: Cursor Control and Media:
I put cursor controls on the right hand side of Layer 3. This further allows full numeric capability with just the right hand, as I can also move in Excel using just right hand. I have also mapped common media controls here.
That includes using the shift key opposite from the key being capitalized, and always using Caps Lock when capitalizing three or more characters.