Compose key on Pocket Reform?

MNT Pocket Reform
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Has anyone set up a compose key on their Pocket Reform?

If so, how?

And where did you put it?

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If you want to go down a bit of a rabbit hole, you can remap all of your keys with GitHub - kmonad/kmonad: An advanced keyboard manager. At this point you can set up your own layers and do things like mod-taps (where you tap a key for the functionality on the keycap and hold it for some extra functionality).

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I’ve not tried it, but there’s also Kanata which is apparently similar, but written in Rust:

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Interesting… I took a quick look and it seems to be a kmonad clone.
These are both using almost identical lisp configurations and the .kbd format seems interchangable with one or two slight variations.

My read from the comparisons document is that you would need to use katana over kmonad if you want mouse events. More practically, they both have pretty limited binaries for various OSs – neither seem to ship a .deb or have a ppa – so ease of installation needs to be taken into account.

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I’m a new owner of a pocket reform now and I’m a little bit shocked, that it doesn’t have a CAPSLOCK key, which typically is my compose key. Which one is your compose key now?

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Technically, the firmware has the first key in the sixth row as the compose key. But then the firmware also uses a press of that key to switch the keyboard to a different matrix layer and thus the OS does not see the compose key. This is similar to what the hyper key in the bottom left does on the classic reform keyboard. There, I disabled it and remapped it to something else. On the Pocket you have much fewer keys, so I guess a second layer makes some sense. On the other hand, you might want to control this in software instead of the firmware. Is that what you want? I’m using the NEO2 layout, so through various key bindings I get a few layers on my keyboard for all sorts of keys.

And yes, there is no capslock key. Remember that this is not set in stone. If you want a different layout, you can always change the firmware and flash that or you can use this method to do this in software without firmware changes: Remapping keyboard without firmware modification (adding SysRq key) But of course that method does not allow you to remap the bottom left key as that one is handled by the firmware and not seen by the OS.