Since putting together my ErgoMax a month back, I found myself feeling increasingly less keen to get back to productive stuff, which in my case is programming.
Yesterday I had a moment of clarity on the irritation that I couldn’t previously quite put my finger on — it was the steady hassle of having to fiddle with layer shifting and other mod keys such as shift or command, to type in even just a few lines of code.
How do all the programmers deal with having to constantly key in “, [] and {}, sometimes with cmd, ctrl etc keys held down, on boards without dedicated keys for them?
I use two layers, that I activate holding the two home thumb keys, to place all symbols, numbers and F keys. They are all positioned according to how frequent they are and how they appear together. I also have a lot of combos and macros (in another layer) that helps with recurrent commands. My keymap is extremely complex and optimized for my workflows, but you might take some inspiration from there.