ZMK and designing my keyboard layers

WIP! Last updated Oct 26 2025 while I am still updating my site

Letters are the 80-20 rule: they make up about 20% of the common characters, but 80% of the frequency. Now it’s time to place all the other symbols and navigation keys, and perhaps it’s more like the 60-40 rule for programming :)

I’ve definitely spent much time uselessly pondering my changes. TRuth is, I probably would have been better off confirming more in stone early on, but I’m happy with how it is now.

Core principles:

• I would prefer to keep a number layer.
  • There is some cognitive and mechanical load of having 1 hold / press instead of a single press. …

It feels like there’s a stability gap between having everything on 2 layers (regular + shift), and three layers(regular + shift + layer1). Reasonably, if I could reach the numbers well enough, I should also be able to reach the symbols; the main thing was that I really needed a good place to put my curly brackets, and eventually I liked the structure of having symbols organized more sensibly, so I tried it out.