QMK for gnu/linux

Reason

https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware

https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd

https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad

https://github.com/manna-harbour/xmk

keyd and kmonad are both nice, but typing feels different (not necessarily bad, just different) from qmk (ok, typing on laptop feels bad anyway...)

xmk has x86 but only for zmk. I like qmk better and probably hacking this together took the same amount of time I would have needed to fight with Weston and Zephyr and their weird config and unintelligible errors (I did that some time ago and it was no fun)

How does it work

Input/output same as keyd (grab device / output on uinput), processing qmk.

You'll have to run as root (or change permissions for uinput and add your user to input group - bad security!)

Config

Do a make first to rule out other problems. If the build is ok, look in

Makefile

First couple of lines, should be obvious. This is instead of qmk's config.h and rules.mk. Of course, there's only a fraction of qmk's settings to worry about.

keyboards/<some_kb>/kb.c

This is qmk's <kb_name>.c.

keyboards/<some_kb>/keymap.c

qmk's layers

keyboards/<some_kb>/layout.cpp

kbName and kbBlacklist are for picking the input (you can check your keyboard's name with xinput for instance).

layout - rows on your physical keyboard. For key names look in platforms/x86/cpp/keynames.cpp.

It doesn't matter how you distribute your keys on rows/columns, it just has to be the same in layout/keymap (it doesn't have to look like a picture of your keyboard)

Hacking

Besides qmk, almost all relevant code is in platforms/x86. I did very few changes to qmk (but removed a lot from it, mostly to be able to search for things more easily).

Makefile... well, can't build qmk with g++ and I was too lazy to write C.

For other qmk features (like leader key, tap-dance, ...) you'll have to enable them in Makefile, find the needed files, add them to the Makefile and fix build errors.

I think at least a mutex is needed for catrix (var name to avoid "matrix"). But it hasn't crashed on me yet.

Plenty of room for improvement, like sleeping longer than 20ms in main loop and waking it with an interrupt. Integrating with upstream qmk as another platform (even though I don't think future improvements in qmk will benefit a standard or laptop keyboard).

Copyright

Whatever qmk and keyd have (this is mostly copy/paste from those 2 projects).