Since putting together my ErgoMax a month back, I found myself feeling increasingly less keen to get back to productive stuff, which in my case is programming.
Yesterday I had a moment of clarity on the irritation that I couldn’t previously quite put my finger on — it was the steady hassle of having to fiddle with layer shifting and other mod keys such as shift or command, to type in even just a few lines of code.
How do all the programmers deal with having to constantly key in “, [] and {}, sometimes with cmd, ctrl etc keys held down, on boards without dedicated keys for them?
Over 20 years ago, I had a keyboard that defined a “punctuation pad” that contained a lot of common symbols and combination of symbols on a different layer. I found it useful enough that I have brought that along to any keyboard since then that I could program to have something similar. It doesn’t cover all symbols, because I touch-type the number row, so other than parenthesis they are not part of the “PunctPad”. It’s defined as “1 layer deep” on the right hand, and I have it on all my keyboards. You can find an example here: https://github.com/nomaded/qmk_firmware/blob/ngedv-unify/keyboards/ergodox_infinity/keymaps/ngedv/keymap.c