new keyboard for my writing station
I bought a new 40 percent keyboard. It has a weird name like TH40. The switches were something I had never heard of before but they’re hot-swappable, so it didn’t really matter to me at the time of purchase.
Wisteria? They’re a linear switch, whereas I kind of prefer clicky, but they sound really nice, and might not disturb others as much as the box white or cherry blues do. It’s especially nice when you’ve been typing for a while. So I probably wont be replacing them.
Since it’s a forty-percent keyboard, I had to reassign a few keys. This was something of a nightmare. None of my arm systems could run the native app – it’s electron, what the hell. So I first tried with using Chromium in a few places and it didn’t go well. Complaints all over about version numbers and some possible permissions issues. I borrowed a system to try there, but only tried in the web browser. For some reason, you absolutely have to download the native app. In a last ditch effort I fired up Mac OS – not something I like to do anymore – and fetched and ran the native electron application there.
It gave me the middle finger for a while as it was searching for devices but then miraculously popped in. I immediately set about mapping the apostrophe, quotations, and semi-colon keys. It’s a good thing I prioritized these, because after unplugging it, the damn software would never again (or at least not yet) let me connect the keyboard to program it. So that’s where I am now. I’m missing some other punctuation that I use for navigation, but I might just go grab neovim-easymotion and start using that for navigating around the screen.
Oof, need to stop typing for now, the heavier keys are tiring out my delicate little fingers. I swear I never have this problem with Cherry switches – if you discount the super heavy mx clear that I couldn’t get used to – but it’ll take a few days (I hope) to adjust and things should be normal again.
Update: to connect it, you have to load a custom json file, but if it is already loaded, it wont load it again. So you either have to load a different file, or uncheck the V2 compatibility flag so it loads a broken version. Then loading the correct one with the correct option and switching back to the Config tab will get things going again.
And to do any of that, you have to go into the application settings and enable the Design tab.
I might write up better instructions for reference, no doubt I’ll end up needing this in the distant future when I’ve forgotten it all.
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2024-10-13 - rambling about my laptop(s)
updated: 2024-10-14 15:34:24
generated: 2024-10-15
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