there are a few frontends already as far as I know. Like tkg.io. And that has the advantage of just importing a KLE layout, which is already a nice way to create and share a graphical keyboard layout

the problem with tkg is that it doesn't support a ton of matrix layouts

what do you put QMK on?

I have an Infinity 60%, WhiteFox, and I'll have an M65-A when that group buy comes in in a few months

WhiteFox just got QMK support a few weeks ago

@nimakro I'm playing a little with

config

locally, will get back to you shortly.

@edvin no rush will be back in a little

@nimakro I have to leave soon myself, checking in again tonight.

@kevinmost I'll keep an eye out in the -native channel for the firmware discussions. seems like an interesting proposal

yeah, QMK is already great and probably the best we can get syntactically in terms of building Arduino firmware, but I think that Kotlin Native will bring a lot to the table in terms of making a firmware that newcomers can grok easier

have you seen the Arduino IDE?

and building UIs for a Kotlin Native firmware would be way easier because we could expose an API, and build a TornadoFX GUI 🙂

I have, it's not fun to use

after using IntelliJ, nothing else is quite the same to me

they've simplified C so that you just type in a setup() and loop() method which gets converted to a proper C main and while

yeah, but most full-fledged keyboard firmwares like TMK and QMK are vanilla C/C++, and you build them using a Makefile and flash them with dfu-programmer/dfu-util

yep. have you tried CLion / CMake yet?

I tried CLion a long time ago, I assume it's a lot better now. I've used CMake but the TMK/QMK projects don't use it, they're just vanilla makefiles

I don't think there's a lot that would improve upon QMK's current state besides a rewrite in a friendlier language (I've been looking closely at Kotlin Native and Rust, which should both get AVR soon™, because LLVM is targeting it now). QMK is already great, it's just not easy to get up and running with it

@kevinmost what do you think of the UI? is tkg.io the best in your opinion?

TKG is for TMK, not QMK. And it's nice because it doesn't have its own UI, but it uses Keyboard Layout Editor, which is the de facto way to show off new layouts in the mechanical keyboard community, and it's very easy to understand. It also supports sharing layouts by serializing them to a JSON that gets stored in a Github Gist

doing it all via the web is admittedly nice for newcomers; running software on your own computer is a little clunkier

Quick tip: TornadoFX can run on the web using JPro 🙂

@kevinmost the sharing is pretty cool. I have a bunch of intellij macros for things like View Database, Open Recently, Show Git History that might be useful to others

@edvin this is an example webapp for TMK keymaps http://www.tmk-kbd.com/tmk_keyboard/editor/hhkb/

QMK is based on TMK but needed to fork

whoa, JPro is pretty cool

@kevinmost do you typically call dfu-programmer yourself or is there a c extension in the browser that copies over the hex file bytes?

there's a Chrome extension but I never had any luck with it, I do it myself