Home-row Shift, Enter, Backspace, Escape…?

General
1

Original post
This is a more general question. Does anybody use alternatives to the standard Shift, Enter, Backspace, ESC positions? I think the idea behind home-row-mods is great, but it does not seem to work that well for many. Combo-mods may be an alternative. But either with standard home-row-mods or combo-mods I do not want to “waste” the home row for modifiers, when Shift and Enter or Backspace are used even more often. Such an approach does not seem to be wide-spread, but seems most beneficial to me.

Any thoughts or experience with this? I could get 2 key combos working, but not 3. My current idea is to assign the following to combo-mods:

*Left hand*
LShift (sf),
backspace (sd)
Ctrl (df)

*Right hand*
RShift (jl),
Enter (kl)
Ctrl (jk)

*Both hands*
ESC (fj)
Control-Backspace (dk)
Del (sl)

I think I will try this one out, but before diving into that adventure I surely would like to hear if someone already took a more or less similar road and what the experience was or if you heard from someone else experience.

P.S.: For the SCGA-combos I still can look for alternatives like bottom-row-mods, combo mods on the bottom or top row or just use the default 4 keys on the left side of the keyboard and live with the somewhat cumbersome shortcuts for combos, but which I think are not that important compared to Enter, BS, ESC and Ctrl.

EDIT:

Arrgh, the main idea/ question remains, but a simple implementation like

ifShortcut 82 final holdKey leftShift
ifShortcut 81 final holdKey backspace
ifShortcut 17 final holdKey delete
holdKey a

will not work, because it will conflict with rolls. :frowning:

2

Quick follow-up. After some testing I decided not to use any home-row-mods. The trouble is IMO not worth the win – at least in my use case. I type pretty quickly (average 65 to 85 wpm, bursts up to 120 wpm) where keys are “rolled” and overlap in time. This will interfere with the home-row-mods. So for the important keys like Enter, Backspace, ESC I have now mapped them to very easy accessibly keys in the mod-layer.

I think only Shift could work as a home-row-mod, because when you get a wrong trigger you will just have to correct a typing mistake. While when using Ctrl, GUI, Alt you can trigger functions which a) can take much time to get back to where you were thrown off or b) even worse close apps without saving results and the like. So not worth it IMO.

I now have mapped the right Shift to the /?-key which is better to reach and symmetric to the left one. This is “good enough” for me, so I will not need home-row-mod shift.