Adapting to just 34 keys

A while back I posted about my 38-key layout, and mentioned that the 34-key form factor is quite a bit more common. As it happens, I’ve been dailying 34-key layouts for the past few months and wanted to share the layout I settled on.

There are a lot of hyperoptimized layouts for 34-key boards floating around, but they are not really easy to adapt to when coming from a larger board. My layout developed pretty much organically over the past 4-5 months - the starting point was basically a 60%, and I moved stuff around in a way that felt intuitive to me.

The main tenets of this layout are:

• Home row mods
• Only two layer-tap keys, on the inner thumbs
• Most symbols can be reached with only one hold, though a few need two
• Common function keys (F1-F5) can be reached with only one held key
• Common shortcuts (Cmd-C, Cmd-V, Cmd-X) can be performed on one hand
• No combos besides mod-tap and layer-tap

Without further ado, here it is:

The visualization was produced with keymap-drawer.

It’s drawn here on a Sweep, but I’ve got it running on my Claudia and Corne too.

(I removed the tucky thumb keys since taking that photo of the Corne.)

These keymaps are available in my QMK fork.