I didn’t know my keyboard (Glorious GMMK 2 96% ISO) supports QMK firmware. I didn’t even hear about QMK while buying this keyboard back then. A couple days ago, while mindlessly scrolling YT videos, I saw a video about home row mods. I’ve heard about that in the past and always thought this thing is doable by only using custom open motherboards and self-built microcontroller keyboards. I’m too dumb so I didn’t realize my keyboard is a prebuilt custom keyboard. So turns out my keyboard supports QMK. I began exploring QMK. I had a couple issues with QMK Linux dependencies (Arch Linux Python pip env related problems) and fixed them by just installing packages with sudo.

But Glorious’s fork was old and Arch Linux’s Python is new so there was a deprecated function error. And I fixed it by doing what all of the best programmers do: Used an AI agent. Fixed it with just 4 characters of change and idfc about it now.

I saw that Glorious has their own fork of QMK firmware. Cloned it and set up the env by just following the tutorial (blog post ig) created my own copy of layout and started customising it. My first customisation was obviously home row mods as I got the idea from yt video. After using the mod-tap method to rebind home row keys, I noticed it had a timing problem with key press-hold delay. So an AI agent made a config for increasing that delay and it worked perfectly fine. (don’t yell at me I read the fucking documentation for over 3 hours, tried dozens of parameters can’t figure it out) After that mod I made my second customisation. Which is the best rebind everybody should and can do: caps lock to escape binding. I’ve been using this remap for over 3 years now and I’ve never looked back. In the past I was doing this remap by using KDE Plasma settings, Hyprland config, Niri xkb keyboard config. OS or WM/DE level re-bindings are fine. But keyboard level re-bindings are god level.

After that I’ve done my third customisation for screen brightness keys. By default there were 2 layers and you can access the second layer by pressing and holding the fn key. I chose a and s keys for brightness down and up.

My fourth customisation was easy to access numbers. Yes regular number position is not that hard to access but not the easiest. So I placed them on top of home row keys (q to p keys). and rebind left alt key hold to layer 3 access as I don’t use that key for alt.

Originally that was it. I had accomplished all my shortcut/remap goals. But after 15 minutes, I figured something out: I can’t use WASD to play games with my keyboard. But no problemo. Just remapped right alt key press to toggle activate layer 4 and replaced all regular keys with defaults. Whenever I need to press and hold WASD or any other regular character keys, I just toggle layer 4 by pressing right alt.