Spaceless Keymap

(There is actually space key! Just no biggy useless spacebar)

I would like to share my custom keyboard setup with the coummunity. Here is a little background. I am a hobbist programmer/tinker and been building customize keyboard and developing my own keymaps for a long time. Looking for a Haskell development is what lead me to the wonderful Emacs world. My Emacs setup is mostly base on the idea of evil and leader. I don’t really use much of the modifier keys, but my keymap is actually really good for someone who use default Emacs binding.

What get me started on the jounery of custom keyboard is Plank keyboard. Combing with TMK firmware or QMK firmware (QMK is a fork of TMK which is what I use.) you have endless possibliity. The day I realize I can build my own keyboard layout was golrious! Plank get all my creative juice flowing but I am not a fan of Cherry switch. Luckly there is a custom controller for my daily driver HHKB (Topre switch, I will leave the key switch talk out of this post. It’s a huge topic.) I then remove my HHKB spacebar row and push everything up 1 row and made the Spaceless keymap.

Some of the highlight from those 2 firmware:

Dual role key (single key can have dual action base on tap/hold)
Leader key (this baby is system wide)
Up to 32 layers (layers are like Emacs minor-mod-map)
Tap dance (different action base on single/double/triple taps)
Able to bake in macro
Live record macro and play back
Simultaneous Key Presses
Mouse key movement
MIDI controler (like a piano)
If you know C/C++ then anything is possible.

Whith those building blocks I set out to developing my own keymap. (For Vim user, you can actually program basic Vim movement layer available system-wide)

No. 1 goal is CONFORT
pinkey lateral movement is the worst! Avoid it at all cost.
Thumbs are the strongest fingers, make the most use of it.

My default letter entering keyboard layout is “Colemak-HD” which I found super confortable to type. All the top N(2)-gram words are on the home row. Your fingers don’t move up and down much. Here are my keymaps!

Normal


	q	w	f	p	b	j	l	u	y
0	a	r	s	t	g	m	n	e	i	o	1
2	z	x	c	d	v	k	h	’	”	3
			4	5	6	7	8	9

The homerow bump key is in bold.

0 TAP: ( HOLD: CMD
1 TAP: <leader>
2 TAP: <escape> HOLD: <CMD+ALT+SHIFT>
3 TAP: <return> HOLD: <CMD+CTRL+SHIFT>
4 TAP: _ HOLD: ALT
5 TAP: <delete> HOLD: enter NUMBER-MAP with 8 backward-delete
6 TAP: M-x HOLD: SHIFT
7 TAP: . HOLD: SHIFT with 5 \c{}
8 TAP: <space> HOLD: enter SYMBOL-MAP with 5 <TAB>
9 TAP: \equal HOLD: CTRL
SHIFT, ALT, and CTRL are all trigger by THUMBS easily.
SHIFT are both in the middle. Compare to the old position which pin one of your pinky plus pinky lateral movement. It made typing CAPS WORDS super easy. With SHIFT in the middle I can get away with just one of them really.
I use dual-role key on all my modifier.
In normal map I lifted \prime and \prime{}\prime to their own keys. (instead :of tridictional on top of each other.)
1 It’s a system-wide leader key, I use mostly for window management, switch apps and simple snippits.
2 and 3 those crazy 3 modifiers combo are convenient modifier key for not shadowing any default keys. One key press I get 3 modifiers :)
M-x is the latest addition to the keymap!! I actually use double tap <space> to trigger counsel-MX but can’t help to throw it in there to show my love for Emacs.
top right key which is not showing in this map is search current selected word in Google Definelly one of my favorite key. :)

Symbol map


	~	(	)			[	]	;
/	-	-	+	$	%	@	!	\|	\
`	^	{	}	&	?	<	>	#	:
						X

X mark it thumb pressed down to enable this map.

Number map


	PgUp	Up	PgDw			1	2	3
HOME	Left	DOWN	Right	END	.	4	5	6	0
RET	MRC	TAB	Space			7	8	9
			X

X mark it thumb pressed down to enable this map.
MRC is right mouse bottom.
My right hand is holding a stylus when I am doing graphic design stuff. So I made my left hand being able to trigger some of the most common keys as well like RET, RIGHT MOUSE CLICK, TAB and SPACE.

There are some more maps but it’s mostly personal workflow I will just leave it out. The point of this post is about the idea not super fine grain detials.

One things Emacs made me realize the beauty of having normal, symbol and number maps lay on top of each other is each key position has 3 mnemonics meaning to me. For example the key that house h, <, 7 has 3 meaning which is super helpful to cerate mnemonics hotkeys. It could mean Help, < (directional, indent or grow/shrink) and 7 when combine with other modifier.

Here is an example I could assign


modifier key	grouping	single key	meaning
		think as
<CMD+ALT+SHIFT>	<= ivy related	“<”	shrink buffer
		(scale)
<CMD+CTRL+SHIFT>	<= Paredit related	“<”	slurping
		(directional)
<CTRL>	<= Emacs	“h”	C-h
		(help)

In the 3rd column are all the same physical key. When I wanna trigger ivy-minibuffer-shrink it is actually assign to <CMD+ALT+SHIFT> + h (It’s only 2 key press not 4) but in my head I think that key as < not h.

Another quick example would be like


modifier key	grouping	single key	meaning
		think as
<CMD+ALT+SHIFT>	<= ivy related	”!”	ivy-immediate-done
		(immediate)
<CMD+CTRL+SHIFT>	<= Paredit related	“e”	barfing
		(Extend)

(without Org-mode table I don’t know how would I write this post!)

Keyboard that I would recommend people who is interested in spaceless keymap

All of the fallowing keyboard are programable and have small spacebar.

Plank

HHKB (Topre switch) with hasu’s controller hasu’s controller He is also the creater of `TMK-firmware` SUPER awesome guy!
HHKB Japanese version (Topre) If you don’t want to remove the bottom row. Their spacebar is way smaller.

Ergodox There are many different vender for this. Google it.

MiniVan

Outro

Hope this inspire someone to create their own AWESOME keyborad/map. If you have any question you can find me at:

Reddit: /u/fallencat (mostly hang out at /r/emacs)

Twitter: @Dunkaroo

dunkarooftop/thought