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?
On my 34-40 key layouts I put all the symbols typically used together in programming on the same layer, including symbols that usually require Shift, along with all the numbers. This makes it comfortable to type whole formulas without leaving the symbol layer and without needing Shift. Important bigrams that I can type without switching layers in the middle include <= >= != += -= *= /= %= &= |= -> /* */ => := :) ;) . I also optimize the layer so that none of these are same-finger bigrams. Because = appears in so many bigrams, I found it convenient to map it on a thumb key.
I make sure all the mods are comfortable to use and in the same place on all my layers, either as bottom row mod-taps or on opposite side thumb keys or worst case as a oneshot mod. I don’t need Shift on my symbol layer, so one less mod to worry about.
Probably my favourite feature for a programming key map is _ on a base layer thumb key. That makes typing snake_case_names a breeze.