I’ve been so happy with this keyboard and then I tried to do video editing on it… Needless to say, video editing workflows are another beast when it comes to keyboard usage.
What I can imagine is maybe swapping to another keymap for it, I can’t see holding down a layer key the whole time I edit. But my right hand would be on my mouse for sure, so I’d want to bind common shortcuts like CTRL+K for splitting to some key on the left side.
Anyway, rather than try to reinvent the wheel, I’d love to hear what the community has come up with. All ears! Thanks in advance.
A lot of this really depends on the app that you’re using. I do a lot with screenflow and they kind of force you to use their shortcuts. J / K / L to move around and ; and ' to place the cursor start/end segment.
I’d personally be interested in automating mouse-movements but that’s also made hard by the app because you really need to have your mouse at the right place before being able to automate anything. Eager to hear if other folks have ideas though.
In video editing, which is sadly a mouse-heavy activity (I haven’t fully transitioned to being mouseless yet), I keep my right hand on the mouse and my left hand on the left side of the keyboard. i map essential shortcuts (like delete and cut) to the left side keys (ASDF) for quick access. This setup avoids the need to use the far-right keys to help maintain flow
i focus on memorizing frequently used shortcuts for muscle memory, again predominantly on the left side. For less frequent tasks, use tools like Alfred/key Keypirinha (windows) or a streamdeck for visual shortcuts.
i use dual-function keys on rows 1-6 for additional shortcuts. For example, long-pressing ‘1’ acts as F1, useful for navigating quickly in Premiere Pro. I also made a video about this tip.
Thank you, this was very helpful. I spent about 15 hours video editing last weekend and tried something similar.
I enabled the “double tap to stick” feature for my Mod layer, which I moved to where the Mouse/Caps Lock key is normally, which changes my left hand to do most of what I needed.
Plus and minus keys were nice to constantly zoom in and out, with the SPLIT shortcut being my most frequent video editing action, a quick “save” key and the arrows were nice to go frame-by-frame. I also added “In” and “out” keys for quick rendering part of my sequence for smooth playback.
I kept the bottom row the same for muscle memory shortcuts like undo, redo, cut, copy, paste.
I also kept the number row the same, because I found myself typing in values a lot more than I thought to adjust opacity or other values.
Hopefully this helps another video editor out in the future! I found it helpful to hold the key while also double tapping it to stick for a while if I was really focusing on just splitting / moving clips and not much else.
Needless to say, video editing workflows are another beast when it comes to keyboard usage.
