Since putting together my ErgoMax a month back, I found myself feeling increasingly less keen to get back to productive stuff, which in my case is programming.
Yesterday I had a moment of clarity on the irritation that I couldn’t previously quite put my finger on — it was the steady hassle of having to fiddle with layer shifting and other mod keys such as shift or command, to type in even just a few lines of code.
How do all the programmers deal with having to constantly key in “, [] and {}, sometimes with cmd, ctrl etc keys held down, on boards without dedicated keys for them?
I use combos for all my brackets, though I also have them on a layer. Quote is on my base layer - I have a layout based on Miryoku, which swaps the positions of ‘ and ; from their normal Colemak-DH locations. I think that swap would make sense for QWERTY as well if you’re using a 36 key layout. With 38 keys and up, I have room for ; as well on the outer pinky column.
I also have an override so that the unshifted key is : and I use shift to get ;. Since I mostly write Python and use vim this is a great shortcut - if you use a language with semicolons that behavior probably doesn’t make sense.