I’m still experimenting with a bunch of changes, mostly to help out with my DeQuervain’s, but also trying to cut down on destructive mistakes:
Compared to the default the main changes are in the modifier keys, replacing numlock (which I never use) with a more traditional \|
key, and swapping tab and backspace, which is my most recent change and what I’m getting used to but my reasoning behind that is that accidentally pressing tab (especially in conjunction with cmd) is generally less of a problem than accidentally pressing backspace. Also, many years ago I had a DataHand and so my brain keeps on expecting tab to be where backspace is normally.
The other modifier changes I made: shift is way more useful so it’s the innermost one, so it doesn’t exacerbate my DeQuervain’s; I swapped shift and ctrl on the left hand, and on the right hand shift goes where ctrl was, alt is where shift was, and ctrl is where alt was. The asymmetry between the two ctrl keys takes a little getting used to but this layout seems to handle my heavy use of the ctrl keys (in text editors, where I use ^A, ^E, ^K, etc. a lot) and on Macs you tend not to use alt much. Although this makes paging through active channels in Slack and Discord a bit less convenient.
Oh, and the butterfly key became a cmd, because it’s useful to have a cmd key on both hands.
I haven’t made any changes to the alternate layers. This means that Fn-tab is how I press delete. I’d change that but I still like the idea of the mouse keys (even though I never use them) so I’m not quite ready to make that change. Anyway, chording fn is enough of a deliberate thing that it’s not like I’m pressing del by mistake.
My firmware fork is available at https://github.com/fluffy-critter/Model01-Firmware if anyone else wants to use mine as a starting point for whatever reason.