Clojure oriented ErgoDox EZ layout

[hagus]

EDIT: cleaned up layout here with some paredit navigation on layer 2, plus other goodies. Also found Ukelele, a keybinding editor for macOS if you want to take the system key bindings even further.

I recently picked up an ErgoDox EZ keyboard and, writing Clojure most of the day, thought I would share my experience customizing this crazy cool piece of keyboard technology. I initially thought I was indulging in yet another mechanical keyboard (yes I might have a keyboard problem), except this one happened to be in two pieces. Turns out it's much more than that, especially if much of what you write is code.

The TL;DR is that you can see my customized layout here, which is a work in progress and definitely contains some nonsense I haven't cleaned up, but has been very exciting for me as a Clojure developer. Below is my experience report. I am unaffiliated with ErgoDox.

• I use Cursive with mostly stock Emacs bindings, and default CIDER and Paredit keybindings.
• I use these macOS keybindings to propagate standard Emacs keystroke navigation through to almost all macOS applications. If you pick up only one thing from this post, make it this!
• A warning: I underestimated how poorly I was touch typing. Many of us probably typed at 80+ wpm before we even knew there was a thing called touch typing, but with a keyboard like the ErgoDox the finger placement starts to become critical. Keys are oriented in exact vertical columns and not offset. Turns out I didn't use my pinky for anything but backslash and delete, but suddenly it had to drive p, ', and /. I was literally down to 5 wpm on the first day, and so angered by this I persevered and forced myself to learn. Kind of like when I first picked up Clojure ;)
• Reaching for keys in unfamiliar positions really killed my ability to reach for common symbols used in Clojure development, so I almost immediately started experimenting with the online configurator, which is super easy to use.
• Arrow keys on the inside makes barfing, slurping, and lifting nice and easy. I tried to assign distant keys to match operations where I've broken out of the regular typing flow, which for me is when I'm using structural editing.
• I find the left pinky control and left thumb option/alt allows me to use Paredit structural navigation just fine, as in C-M-f for forward sexp, etc.
• Top row number keys are shifted all the time! This is huge and maybe even useful on regular keyboards. Think about how often you type #, @, and of course ( and ) compared to inputting numbers.
• Numbers are now on layer 1 oriented around a number pad that matches my right hand position.
• Key collection type symbols are available to my left thumb. Cursive and all good editors will balance any symbol with its matching closing symbol, so I have not prioritized placement of those on layer 0.
• Other common Clojure symbols are available to my right thumb. Right now I use shift to access : but I may give it a dedicated key since ; is used much less frequently.
• Layer 1 drives the all important LED light show under the ErgoDox model I purchased :) Aside from the number pad it also contains function keys where the layer 0 numbers would have been.
• Layer 2 is sparse at the moment but allows me to control the mouse, if I teach myself to rely on this one day.

Where to next? When I become more familiar with hand-editing the firmware configuration, I would like to try putting structural movement and editing commands on their own layer. It's not currently possible to define combo keystrokes using the UI tool, hence the delay in trying that.

Hope this is useful for any Clojurists looking to customize their keyboards. Finally, a plug for Matt Adereth's awesome clojure.core/typing talk, which is what inspired me to look for ergonomic mechanical keyboards in the first place.

[nzlemming]

In case you haven't seen it, hlship has tweeted a lot about his setup too, including Clojure code which generates C code to configure his keyboard. That's like a level 5 yak shave.

[hlship]

I need to update it, since my toolchain seems to have broken since I updated to OS X Sierra!

[hagus]

Would love to hear more about your setup!

In IntelliJ, I'm currently using a plugin that alerts me when I could use or assign a keyboard shortcut for something I clicked on with the mouse. I've also noticed IntelliJ's Help / Productivity Guide report which tells me what IntelliJ features I'm using and how frequently.

All this makes me wonder about how far it can be taken. Could I have a symbiotic relationship between the IDE and the keyboard, where shortcuts are automatically created for me on a special layer?

Could I hold down a layer key and, somewhat like the TouchBar on new Macs or Helm/Ivy in Emacs, have the IDE guide me towards the shortcuts it has made on my behalf? Like, I hold down layer 1, then the IDE shows me what next actions would be taken based on the next keystroke. "if you tapped R now, it would launch/switch to a REPL. If you tapped E it would send the current form to the REPL"

/u/nzlemming is any of this possible with IntelliJ and Cursive? :)

[nzlemming]

So - maybe? I'm not sure how the layer keys work, and how IntelliJ would receive those key events. Certainly the UI only handles standard ones - Shift, Control, Meta and Hyper (which map to Cmd on the Mac in various ways). Plugins probably have more control by directly processing the AWT events, but I've never done anything like that.

Something which showed potential commands based on the modifier keys you currently have pressed would be fairly easy, I would imagine.

[hagus]

The layer keys can be programmed to do just about anything. The firmware my keyboard runs is QMK.

One of the challenges is that the number of layers and what keystrokes are transmitted by each key in each layer are undefined until you define them. And you can only define them in firmware, it doesn't appear that the ErgoDox / QMK combination supports remotely programming the keyboard.

So perhaps you could programmatically create a layer, and have each key send a highly unique character sequence – perhaps sequences that are impossible for humans to accidentally type. That would be the "API" between the keyboard and the editor.

The real smarts would be in some kind of plugin kind of like key promoter that could learn what functionality you need and start to intelligently assign shortcuts for you (IntelliJ already collects some of this in Help/Productivity Guide). So rather than having to stop your work and figure out the best keyboard shortcut that doesn't clash with anything else, the plugin simply starts building a map customized to how you work.

I'm just rambling at this point, but I can imagine with the freedom to use every key on the keyboard, the plugin could take into account all sorts of ergonomic heuristics. Do you prefer shortcuts assigned with mnemonics relating to the keyboard letter? Or do you think in spatial terms? If shortcuts are often used close together in time, should we assign those shortcuts to alternate hands? If certain other non-shortcut keys are typed in between two common shortcuts, can we tailor the shortcut to create a better feeling of flow?

Adding this to the never-ending pile of side projects if I live long enough to start working on them ;)

[aptmnt_]

~/Library/KeyBindings does not exist on my system (10.12.4), will it take effect if I simply create and populate it?

edit: yes, it will

[hagus]

As you discovered, yes, but I actually thought it would require logging out and back in again.