I’ve got a shiny new PVT keyboard here and I’ve found it frequently awkward to type on since I normally use dvorak. Specifically, I’ve been using dvorak soft-mapped from qwerty hardware. This mostly worked on the keyboardio hardware, but several keys were weird, like if I wanted a ? I had to hit Fn-U. And there were several other things I wanted to change too…
So I tried out the firmware tools today and started on a new layout. Here’s what I changed so far:
- /? and =+ keys moved back where =+ key was. (=+ requires Fn)
- [{ and ]} keys where Butterfly and -_ used to be (left and right ends of right hand’s bottom row).
- Esc on Prog key, and `~ keys on Fn-Prog. (upper left corner)
- Tab to the left of Q.
- Insert where Esc used to be (bottom right corner of left hand).
- Enter on Fn-’ (where a traditional Enter key goes, approximately).
- Original Tab and Enter keys unmapped. Not sure yet what to do with them, but this at least keeps me from hitting Enter by accident every time I try to hit the D key (H on qwerty).
- Mouse navigation keys on Fn-ESDF.
- Mouse buttons on Fn-XCV (left/middle/right).
- Mouse scroll wheel up/down on Fn-WR.
- Arrow keys on Fn-IJKL.
- Both shift keys moved next to thumb home position, swapped with Cmd and Alt.
- Don’t activate numlock when both Fn keys are pressed. (use Key_Keymap1_Momentary instead of Key_KeymapNext_Momentary)
- All multimedia keys removed.
- All mouse warp keys removed.
- Rainbow wave effect by default at power-on.
- Rainbow wave brightness reduced to reduce power consumption and increase LED life.
These changes seem to help considerably so far, but I still want to change a few things…
- Water-splash lighting effect.
- Figure out what to do with all the blank mappings on Fn keys.
- Slower mouse acceleration.
- Probably other things, but it’ll take some time to decide what.
My OS (Debian) still thinks the hardware is qwerty, so that I can continue to also use qwerty hardware on the same computer without having to remap every time I change what is plugged in, so the letters are technically still qwerty in the firmware. But these layout changes help get some of the other keys in the places where my fingers expect them to be.
Now if I can just get used to having the left hand’s bottom row basically shifted one column to the left (compared to a traditional staggered layout), I’ll be pretty much golden. 
