I made a thing: a tool that allows programmable keyboards to send arbitrary Unicode characters. I created this mainly for myself, but I'm curious to know if there are other persons on this planet that could use it, so here it is:

https://crates.io/crates/infinikey

Because you didn't ask, here's my story. 😉

Ever since I bought a split ergonomic keyboard (2008, Kinesis Advantage 2), I have used an English keyboard layout at work despite being German and working in Germany. I think that for my field (software development), English layouts are just superior to the German one(s).

Still, I also need German umlaut characters for emails and chats in German. Back then I only used Windows at work, so using some Microsoft tool I created a custom keyboard layout. It mapped Ctrl-Alt-A to the letter ä, for example. The problem was that (some) software would still receive the Alt key and for example open its menu. So I built a script with AutoHotkey that handled these keypresses and that worked better. I installed the script on the work and home PCs, and when I got a new keyboard (2023, MoErgo Glove80) I started using it both at work and at home.

Fast forward to last year, when I started at a new company, and my department there does not use Windows but Linux - yay! However, that meant my AutoHotkey scripts no longer worked. 😢

I could probably have fiddled with xkb and things, but I really wanted _one_ solution that works on Linux and Windows. After several experiments (different approaches with XCompose/WinCompose and 'misusing' the Espanso text expander), a few months ago I finally decided I need to write my own software. And as of this week, it's not only good enough for daily use, but also published and installable by anyone! 🎉

Thanks for reading this far. Let me know if you're one of the maybe 10 to 100 persons in the world who have some use for this software. 🙂

#MechanicalKeyboard #Keyboard #FOSS #OpenSource #Rust #Glove80 #KinesisAdvantage #Windows #Linux #ZMK

I finally hooked my glove80 to my mac and I may have to do some keymap changes for the "system" button. On windows/linux it was fine, I didn't need it very often, but with MacOS it does most things and its a bit of a stretch for the thumb.

#keyboards #glove80 #macos

Ok, I ended up going with the Glove80 ergonomic keyboard. I've not spent this much on a keyboard before, so my hopes are high on this purchase.

I did some research before I pulled the trigger. Originally, I was leaning towards the Kinesis Advantage 2 or 360, but after reading some reviews and YouTube videos, I went with the Glove80.

#keyboards #ortholinear #glove80 #ergonomic

TLDR: Anyone got a good resource on keyboard-centric Windows workflows?

I - as a lot of us - have to use a #Windows machine for work. Due to being an old man I struggle with elbow and wrist pain and therefore bought a #MoErgo #Glove80 keyboard. That has helped but comparing to my i3wm tiling setup I use for #linux I would like to go down a keyboard-centric approach to using Windows. Alt-tab doesn't really do the trick. Anyone got a good blog post / video / whatever to share?