Ep583, Svalboard Datahand Exploration. Most fantastic keyboard!

[@Svalboard]

Thanks for the intro Xah! The reason for the USB cables not being mirrored is just to keep part count down. Maintaining a whole other MCU design just to mirror those connectors would bring a lot of extra inventory hassle and a lot of extra EECAD work for me. Once you get it set up it doesn't matter, of course :) I'm really excited to explore host-side app-context-aware layer stuff -- I'd love to have an auto layer available depending on app context. ZSA has done some neat work on this but it's all closed-source on the host side, so I'm hoping some more folks will join us to do a fully OSS version. I don't want to own it, I just want it to exist for everyone.

[@XahLee]

shout out for open source coders who can enhance the software ZSA-like features mentioned above!

[@bradd5961]

The fact they have used VIAL is genius. Such a powerful and easy to use software.

[@Svalboard]

For layout, the Hands Down folks are going craaaazy with it. But I'd recommend just sticking with what you know. Dvorak and Colemak are pretty similar, neither is great on bottom row. Better than QWERTY, but the real maniacs are messing around with Hands Down variant layouts, but they're pretty far out. Some people have swapped Dvorak top/bottom rows to improve this, but the biggest gain is in the reduction of motion and force. I still use DH-QWERTY 20+yrs later. If I had to start from scratch I certainly wouldn't choose it, but... it's fine. Exploiting your existing basic top/home/bottom row muscle memory for a layout on Svalboard will be much faster transition than starting from scratch on something new. The folks on 36-key boards generally transition over in a couple of weeks instead of a couple of months. But it took me about 6 weeks when I first learned 20+ yrs ago because I didn't have any experience with using multiple thumb keys.

[@XahLee]

great tip. i think i'll start out with dvorak then. thank you!

[@zachvalenti]

This is awesome! Or should I say *fantastic* 😂 Looking forward to future updates as you get more comfortable with it

[@zachvalenti]

21:14 - Svalboard connected & starting to set it up with Vial