Plus the Amazon keycaps I already have on the way that are pretty similar to the theme. It won’t be the same aesthetic case wise, and won’t feel nearly the same. But then I’m getting bluetooth and 2.4 wireless (great for when I KVM to my work laptop).
While the price is indeed way too high, we can at least understand why it is so, considering it’s their first product of this kind from a company which isn’t huge.
That said, I really don’t like Fira Sans so the typeface of the stock keycaps are an instant turn off for me, and yeah, if you are paying almost $300 on a board, you should be able to have a board with a nice keycap set.
Like, why put the arrows keys as literal text instead of, you know, arrows?
Domikey SA:
Villanella Pink Black
One or two of the ransoms are Navy Seals Green and Yellow
Some White on Black
Bunch of the purple and white Cell SA, the DBZ ones
One or two Orange Dolch keys
Might be some of then purple keys from the Marvel Black Panther
Yeah, I appreciate what they do for the Linux community but I would much rather they drop some of the BS features like RGB lighting and just focus on a affordable, first entry to the market then later start adding features. Also, the marketing materials seemed to make it out like you had to use PopOS in order to actually use any of the software functions. Why didn’t they just use standard qmk?
Yeah, I think the best move would be to return the Q1 and go another route, or wait for v2. Or better yet, just stick with this GK61X, and just try some different switches. I don’t mind these Silent Alpacas, but I think that the dampened Razer Optical Reds are a nicer feeling switch. I wish I could find a switch similar to those that didn’t need to be modded.
The Tofu84 does look pretty nice. At first I thought I would want a similar layout, but I think I’d prefer an exploded 75.
They’d layout is insane, it goes not just against convemtion but also sense. It is not useful, or even sensical to their their own philosophy. The PCB is a mess, and this being polite. The features are very strange for a serious Linux work board. They forked QMK and have not contributed at all back or even conformed if it is actually going to use a recognisable QMK implementation, they said they will have their own editor! Why it has all that it is estabilished support and community mods, and they why supposedly support open source are oddly silent on that matter. Their community outreach and forum presentation is beyond unprofessional.
And good fucking luck getting caps… They are going to add entire new subsets of caps just for this mess.
Yeah, for the price you’d think they would at least have something like Oryx from ZSA available. That thing is actually pretty nifty.
It sounds like you can update the firmware from within the “pop shop”, but I haven’t looked into exactly how that’s done, or how it would translate to other distros.
Yeah, I wasn’t sure how I would get along with a 60% because I use the F-row, arrows, and End/Home a lot. With that said, the lack of dedicated F-row has been the easiest to adjust to. And as far as the arrow keys are concerned, I prefer the layout of the Epomaker GK61x over the Razer Huntsman Mini.
It uses this layout [picture stolen from internet]:
The flipside is that the FN placement on the Huntsman is in a better spot for me to hold it down with my thumb and use F11 and F12 when debugging code.
So what I’ve done is remapped caps lock to superesc, remapped winkey to another modifier layer, and set my vim keys to arrow keys on that modifier layer. I then have both my normal FN layer and the additional mod layer have caps lock actually be caps lock. It really makes my keyboard-centric workload much better.
I have a TKL board, but it will work just as well with a 60%. You could also use that mod layer for your F keys.
Right, but then you need to do that on every computer you use. I have a 3-system KVM, with one of the “systems” being a thunderbolt dock that frequently rotates different laptops, so I prefer to add all of that to the keyboard firmware, not the OS.
I’ve also got some other features on it, like space-cadet shift keys. left shift: parenthesis open, right shift: parenthesis close.
And, of course, all of this can be disabled with FN+F10, to give me a default keyboard layout in case I need to let a normie drive.
Yeah, I meant to check out Autohotkey last week, but kinda forgot about it. I was going to use it to use the Application key to act as a 2nd Fn layer so I could program my own keys as a Fn layer since Razer limits which keys you can reprogram with their Fn key.
Then I got the Epomaker this week, I still need to checkout the software it comes with to see how limited it is, or isn’t.
I wish either of these boards were QMK or VIA compatible.
The only positive for the Razer software was I reprogrammed the Application key to be F1 so I could quick pull up my character in Destiny 2 without having to Fn + 1.
