To be more productive, keyboard shortcuts are commonly used. But these keyboard shortcuts can have unintuitive key combinations with modifiers that contort your hands in uncomfortable ways. Keyboard layers solves both of these problems and provide an interface to help organize keyboard shortcuts in an intuitive and ergonomic way.
Hello, my name is Jon and I am a software engineer that uses keyboard layers to improve my workflow and ergonomics. I have been creating keyboard layers since 2020 and use 14 layers regularly. I created The Ultimate Guide to Keyboard Layers to collect my thoughts on layers and share what I have learnt on my keyboard journey.
I decided to publish using gitbook because it has version control and a clean documentation design. Version control means users can look at an earlier date of gitbook to find layers that may have inspired their setup. Also, because I am constantly iterating my layers and thought process, gitbook is a good way to cleanly update changes.
This book is made up of 6 sections. Chapter 1 is about the keyboard fundamentals that will get you updated on basic terminology and give reasons why to use layers in the first place. Chapter 2 talks about keyboard setup, which includes the keyboards, the firmware and independent software that are commonly used. Chapter 3 is about layer activators, that let you transition into other layers. Chapter 4 is about creating layers, which involves both planning and implementing layers. Chapter 5 is advance layer patterns to help design better layers. And finally, Chapter 6 are layer examples that have related code snippets, images and charts to help illustrate how to adapt the layout to your keyboards software.