The lily58 was my first alternative keyboard and is still a favorite. I mostly rock the corne these days but have a few lillies kicking around. So the dizave layouts are my attemp to have a layout that works will on both of those keyboards, tailored to my ridiculous needs and preferences.
I knew right away however that I was going to want to go a bit smaller. I looked for a layout that worked on both the lily and the corne and quickly found miryoku.
While miryoku is amazing and very well thought out, it leaves many keys unused on the lily and even a few unused on the six column corne. After a good deal of thought and experimentation I decided to work on a pair of layouts for these two keyboards that were inspired by miryoku but that made use of the extra keys.
In some ways this is inferior to simply usuing miryoku everywhere, an approach which provides the highest level of consistency between keyboards. Nevertheless, I suspect there are other people like me out there that like miryoku but wouldn't mind being able to use the extra keys when they are available. Hopefully this layout can fill that need.
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Mostly compatible with the miryoku layout while taking advantage of the extra keys on the lily58 and six-row corne
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Support both QWERTY and COLEMAK
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Switch between windows and mac
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Support unicode characters on windows and mac
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Make better use of the display
The layouts are basically self-documenting, but here they are:
This is my primary layer, and one of the two default layer choices. Although I've included shift on the home row, I mainly use it on the two main thumb keys. There is no dedicated shift for the pinky fingers. The QWERTY is the same but, you know, with a QWERTY layout.
The dizave58 uses home row mods in the GACS configuration (for windows) or CAGS (for mac). The display shows either a windows or mac symbol to indicate which mode the keyboard is in. For an amazing overview of home row mods, check out precondition's page.
Many of the existing lily58 keymaps use the pinky keys and/or the thumb cluster for the mod keys. This isn't really an option on the corne, and didn't strike me as a good use of the thumb cluster on the lily either. So I've mostly avoided doing that. The outermost thumb keys duplicate, mainly because I couldn't put anything important there because then I'd be missing it on the corne.
Although in general I have tried to keep keys on the opposite side of the board from the corresponding layer key, I have made a small departure here. The parentheses keys are duplicated under the index and middle fingers of the right hand. I have found this easy and useful in many cases where I am entering numbers (for example, when entering a phone number with area code).
The number layer also has the ability to configure the keyboard. In the upper left, the top two keys are used to change the default layer go either QWERTY (df(0)) or COLEMAK (df(1)).
The lower right switches between windows and mac mode. The current mode is displayed in the OLED. Currently all this means is that the GUI and CTRL keys are switched.
OK, so, admittedly this layer is only useful to people who are appellate lawyers in New Mexico and rock a corne or a lily. So, just me.
I put federal on the left and New Mexico on the right.
The quote gives you a close quote single quote, the kind you use at the beginning of a shortened patent number that can be such a pain to enter.
I didn't find the display on the default keymap very useful. Although the display itself is vertical, the text on it is horizontal. And the information on the display wasn't particularly useful either, consisting mostly of information about the most recently typed keys.
On the left display, I have changed the text to be displayed vertically. This creates an obvious limitation: each line is only five characters. On the other hand, there are many more lines to work with.
At the top, it displays what layer is active. This is particularly important since the default layer can be either QWERTY or COLEMAK. The other available layers are the navigation layer and the numbers layer.
The dizave58 uses home row mods in the GACS configuration (for windows) or CAGS (for mac). The display will show either a windows or mac symbol to indicate which mode the keyboard is in. This will also (eventually) also indicate which unicode mode is current, windows or mac.
The display also shows the home row mods as either CAGS or GACS. When a modifier is pressed, that modifier is highlighted in the display.
Finally, the display will show "CAPS" when the caps lock is on.
When the number layer is active, the left display shows the keymap for the main 5x3 keys. If you hit shift it will show the shifted values.
There is an adjust key to switch between windows and mac modes. The keymap decides what mode it is in by looking at whether gui and control have been swapped. This setting is stored in the EEPROM so it is persistent.
The main difference is that the gui and control keys are swapped. This is shown in the OLED. This makes it pretty painless to switch between PC and Mac, at least for the tools that I use. But this also allows the keyboard to send unicode correctly based on the selected OS.
The large thumb keys are space and backspace, respectively. I had originally used space and enter, like many other keymaps, but backspace is used much more frequently so I moved it to the more accessible location.
The large thumb keys operate as shift when held. This has made a huge difference for me. I can'd believe space isn't shift everywhere, it just works so well.
None of my Lilys have LEDs. (Don't get me started on how the PCBs in the lily58 glow repository are broken). And, in any event, the MT3 keycaps I am using on them don't let the light through anyway. So as much as I enjoy a good light show, I've disabled it in this keymap.
- close key that is cmd Q on mac and alt F4 on windows
- get underglow working