I’ve ordered a Drop + OLKB Planck Mechanical Keyboard Kit V6 40% and expect it in a week or so.
In the meantime, I’m eager to get on board with QMK. I use Ubuntu Linux and am a retired coder
using python. I see the following: qmk docs and Youtube tutorial.
I understand that there may be some variations (by keyboard) in the application of QMK, so I want to make sure that Iam looking at content that is appropriate for this 40% planck.
On a related note, will I find tap dancing implementable on my planck?
I recently built a planck, I’m not sure if I could use it without tap dance. That being said, I also chose to set mine up with Vial as I don’t think I would be able to figure out how to implement Tap Dance in code. On Ubuntu you should have no problem installing QMK according to the install directions in the docs using pip. I set it up on a raspberry pi recently and it was pretty straight forward. I found this page very useful for understanding how home row mods work and some tips. It takes a bit of getting used to as there can be a little delay on keypresses, l type pretty slow so it doesn’t bother me much but YMMV. You sound like you’re probably more knowledgeable in regards to coding than l am so Vial may not be necessary for you but l’ve found that having a GUI that l can make quick adjustments to my keymaps has been very useful as l’m new to 40% and not sure exactly what l want yet.
Good info! Glad to hear that tap dance is available for the planck 40%.
I will definitely check out both QMK and Vial. I’m comfortable with the command line, but not a ninja,
and I would never object to a user-friendly GUI. This will be my third 40%. I have also a vortex core
and a qisan 49.
If you’ve set up dev environments via command line, I don’t think you’ll have any trouble working with QMK. There are a lot of tap dance tutorials online and I was able to implement and customize tap dance pretty easily.
I should have added that I was able to accomplish most of what I wanted to do with tap dance using mod-tap.
There are a lot of different tap functions that I found to more useful than requiring additional taps on a key in the long run; this tutorial on QMK tap functions was super helpful in understanding all of the functions available for various tap options.
The tap-dance section of this QMK cheatsheet was super easy to follow and set get tap-dance working for me. The cheatsheet is barebones–as you’d expect–but you can reference the much longer official QMK documentation for tap-dance to flesh out any blind spots.
No matter which direction you go, I would strongly recommend starting with the keymap.c file for Planck and make minor modifications to start rather than a blank file.
Let me know if you run into issues and I can try to point you in the right direction.
Thanks for that reply. Lots of good links. I would note that it appears that qmk uses a default keymap.c and other files to create a new directory for a new keymap build.
qmk new-keymap
Keyboard Name: planck
Keymap Name: planck_test
Ψ planck_test keymap directory created in: /home/tim/qmk_firmware/keyboards/planck/keymaps/planck_test
Ψ Compile a firmware with your new keymap by typing:
qmk compile -kb planck -km planck_test
Now there is a new directory with files that appear to be copied from ~/qmk_firmware/keyboards/planck/keymaps/default. Makes perfect sense and the C code brings back distant memories.
