I find one modifier plus a home-row key to be much more comfortable than reaching several rows up for an F-key.
The author's whole point here is that QMK (or ZMK, which I use) lets you customize it to exactly your own needs!
The author's whole point here is that QMK (or ZMK, which I use) lets you customize it to exactly your own needs!
Just for an example off the top of my head, in JetBrains IDEs the shortcut for hiding all tools is Ctrl-Shift-F12.
But so many keyboards cut that number down so drastically. I use home, end, delete, page up/down, all the time not to mention the number pad as a whole, and all the Fkeys.
1) My space key is right CTRL when held down.
2) I have two keys for "<RET>", one on each thumb cluster, one is Alt when held down, the other is left CTRL.
3) Page up and down have their own keys on one of those clusters because I no longer needed them for the modifiers, and so page up and down are also home and end if they're held down.
4) Auto shift is on, and I've tuned to to eliminate most of the accidental shifts while keeping it relatively quick to type CONSTANT_VALUES (I actually still have shift keys in the usual positions but on the ergodox I have it feels like a big stretch to hit them and type so I use the auto-shift most of the time, but I do admit this is the convenience function I have the most love/hate relationship with)
5) The shift keys themselves give me open parentheses (left shift) and close parentheses (right shift) when double tapped.
The only chording I have to do these days (that isn't normal keyboard shortcuts) is I have a dedicated key to switch to a layer for FN keys when held down. And the reality is I could (and should) probably map the number keys to be FN keys when double tapped since I don't think I ever hold an FN key down.
This[1] isn't my most current layout (missing the home/end on the pageup/down buttons) but it's pretty much what I've landed on after about a year of using one of these. And realistically there are unused keys there I could remap still. The CTRL where the capslock key would be is never used in favor of the thumb cluster versions, the left and right CTRL keys on the tops of the two thumb clusters are leftovers from older layouts and unused right now. I've never used the "Meh" key or the "'" and "Capslock" keys in the lower left. The "Command-enter" and "[" and "]" keys in the lower right are another leftover from an older layout that are also unused now. So lots of room to play around still.
Not saying you should definitely switch, there are still some things that I'm not 100% happy with (those inner symbol keys are a stretch sometimes and depending on what code I'm writing feel like I could move them around) and getting used to the ortholinear layout is a whole thing on its own. But if it's something that interests you, maybe that layout can help you find a good starting point.
[1]: https://configure.zsa.io/ergodox-ez-st/layouts/wzKWq/latest/...
I was in the same boat, doing most text navigation on the keyboard and fully adapted to the quirky arrangement of home/end/pgup/pgdn of the Microsoft natural keyboard elite I’d been coding on for 23 years.
But I do a lot of nomading, so I really wanted a small keyboard. And I’m a tall guy, so I was looking for a full split (I tried the Kinesis Freestyle2 for a while but didn’t love it).
I bought a ZSA Voyager. The first day I went from ~120wpm to 20. I hated it and had buyer’s remorse. Second week, I was still switching to another keyboard in the afternoons because I was making so many typos and felt so tired. I swapped out most of the switches with higher force ones, and that helped a ton. It took about two months before the keyboard disappeared again and there was only me and the work.
The biggest single win is that backspace is under my right thumb next to space bar, which felt life-changing once I got used to it (if I were still using a normal keyboard, I’d probably re-map right alt to backspace). And while word selection with ctrl+shift+arrow took a bit longer to get used to, now I appreciate not having to move my fingers at all to hit the arrow keys.
Nine months later, you can pry the Voyager from my cold dead hands. It’s probably the last keyboard I’ll ever buy. I do wish it had two more keys (haven’t found good homes for Alt and ~) but overall I’m very happy with where I ended up.
Like, I legitimately don't know anymore how you take a screenshot on MacOS, but I know that I hit the modifier key and then this one other key, and that takes a screenshot. Also don't know what you press to move from virtual screen to virtual screen, but mod-m and mod-comma go left and right for me. And in a browser, mod-s and mod-f do ctrl-shift-tab and ctrl-tab.
It's a terrible idea to do this for rarely-used shortcuts, as you'll never remember them; but for ones you use frequently, it's better-than-native, because you can put them on convenient keys that are easy to hit, rather than whatever contortions you'd need to do to hit Ctrl-Shift-F12.