I think I qualify as one of the guys that tries to use the UHK to its full potential, and push beyond into the niche features range.
Yes, I am experimenting with home-row mods. I’ve found that the implementation in Kanata functions a good deal better compared to the advanced secondary mode on the UHK. The two things you can do better with Kanata are:
- It allows configuration to enable short-timed mods only with keys from the other hand, thus minimising problems with quick finger rolls; but at the same time allow same-hand mods if the mod key is held long enough.
- While typing very quickly, mods can be disabled until a short pause in the stream of key presses is detected, thus eliminating spurious false mods. It takes a bit of clever configuration to do this, but I think it is a really useful setting. This is achieved in Kanata by switching to a base layer without home-row mods as soon as one of the home-row mod keys triggers as primary. At the same time, it starts a timer which re-enables home-row mods after no key has been pressed for a (short) while (~20-25ms).
I don’t know how any of these two functionalities could be achieved with the current capabilities of the UHK macro language. Or it would require really a lot of complicated macro code.
I am not sure what these features do, or what you mean with these terms; I am not very familiar with qmk or zmk.
I mean, I think I understand combos, and they can be done with the UHK, although a bit cumbersome to configure if you want to trigger them in any order of key down events. (Different macros using ifShortcut need to be bound to all keys that can start a chord with the following keys in order.)
With transparent keys, do you mean the ability to leave keys on a layer blank, so that this key just triggers whatever the underlying (base) layer does? This is only available on the Control, Shift and Alt layers on the UHK, but not on the Mod, Mouse, or Fn* layers. I don’t see the use case though, because why would you shift to a layer holding a layer key and then just press another key to achieve the same as if you had not pressed the layer key at all? For Control, Shift and Alt it makes more sense, because you would be overriding the normal modifier function, but fall back to the regular modifier action when it is ‘transparent’ on the corresponding modifier layer.
And what are behavioural mods and non-binding macros? May I ask you to elaborate?
I’d like to understand in more detail what you see missing, and perhaps gather new ideas what I want to try, either in Kanata or in UHK macors.