78 lines
4.7 KiB
Markdown
78 lines
4.7 KiB
Markdown
* The "Cadet-Style" keymap for the melody96.
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* Author: Yonatan Zunger (zunger@gmail.com)
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This is an experimental keymap being used both for practical reasons (as my daily driver) and to
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work out the ideas of a "space-cadet-style" keyboard which can type text and mathematical symbols
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with equal ease. It's designed for anyone who frequently needs to do this outside of a LaTeX
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environment, or for anyone who loves the old "Space Cadet" keyboard! And it works at its best when
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you have actual Cadet keycaps (like SA Symbolics) installed, because those keycaps will actually
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show what you get.
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The core idea of this keyboard is that, in addition to a QWERTY base layer and a function layer, it
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supports two additional base layers -- the GREEK layer (the analogue of the Space Cadet "Greek," or
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"Front," keys) and the CADET layer (the analogue of the Space Cadet "Top" keys). These layers use
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Unicode to generate all of the mathematical symbols you can find on a traditional Space Cadet
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layout, plus a bunch of extras.
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Because Unicode can't be encoded using the traditional USB HID protocol, QMK does some clever but
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horrifying things to fool your OS. One consequence of this is that the shift key needs to be handled
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by the keyboard firmware, not the host OS. To handle this, we have two additional layers --
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SHIFTGREEK and SHIFTCADET -- and handle the flipping between all of these layers here in the
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firmware.
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*The simple bit: Using this layout on a Melody96*
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At the core of this layout are three special modifier keys and two special lock keys:
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* The GREEK key, to the right of the spacebar, activates the GREEK layer. GREEK+SHIFT activates
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SHIFTGREEK. These keys generate Greek letters on the letter keys (thus the name), and a few
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mathematical symbols on other keys. They correspond to the notations on the front of traditional
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Space Cadet keys; if your capset doesn't include those (alas, most don't), they're the "pretty
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obvious" mappings.
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* The CADET key, to the right of GREEK, activates the CADET layer. These are the symbols above the
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letters on a Space Cadet layout. CADET+SHIFT activates the SHIFTCADET layer, with even more
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symbols.
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* The FUNCTION key, to the right of CADET, activates the function layer. This is where you have a
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reset mechanism, a selector for which Unicode input type you want, and so on.
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Additionally, GREEK+ALT is equivalent to CADET. This is handy for other keyboards where you don't
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have room for this many modifiers.
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The lock keys are:
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* Caps lock, if you use it, will also act as a "shift lock" for the Greek and Cadet layers. Shift
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lock is slightly different, in that while it is engaged shift will _dis_engage it; that's actually
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pretty useful when typing math.
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* An additional "layer lock" key, by default where "num lock" usually goes, will lock the choice of
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base layer. To use it, hold down any invocation of the GREEK or CADET layers, or none at all, and
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hit lock; it will then put you in that layer. The corresponding modifier key will then toggle you
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back to the QWERTY layer. (So for example, if you hit GREEK+LAYER_LOCK and release them, you're
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now typing in Greek; the GREEK modifier would cause you to type QWERTY momentarily. To go back to
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ordinary QWERTY mode, you'd just hit LAYER_LOCK again with no modifiers held)
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To see the full layout, check out the big comment in keymap.c.
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*A less-simple bit: Adapting this to other keyboards*
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This is really a canary for generic Cadet implementations. Before this can be made generic, a few
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things will have to happen:
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(1) Instead of a fixed keymap, this has to be refactored into some kind of array showing the
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mappings of QWERTY-layer keys onto the appropriate code points in the GREEK and CADET layers, and
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some preprocessor magic needs to auto-transform this plus a traditional keymap for the QWERTY layer
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into keymaps for all five of the core layers. (Function layers would presumably be handled on a
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per-keyboard basis)
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(2) The standard mapping of those should have some #define's to control things like whether there
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are physical F-keys (you would probably want to move superscript and subscripts onto the numbers if
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there weren't, and figure out what to do with the non-numeric super/sub keys), whether you actually
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want to enable GREEK+ALT=CADET, and so on;
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(3) There should be support for controlling indicator LEDs based on the base layer selection,
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caps/shift lock state, and layer lock state, as well as for triggering audio on transitions;
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(4) All the core fancy logic in process_record_user which implements the layer handling should be
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factored out into its own function, so that keyboards can easily reuse that, too.
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This is a lovely TODO for future work, and could be particularly fun to go along with new releases
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of SA Symbolics and the like. Anyone interested in such things, ping me!
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