I originally posted this on r/emk a few month ago and wanted to preserve the content…

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Hey guys,

I recently discovered urob’s ZMK config and ZMK fork, which has a lot of cutting edge, awesome improvements that have not been merged into ZMK yet.

Here are a few of my favorites…

1. Timeless homerow mods

Homerow mods are a bit of a controversial features. Many people hate them, because of frequent involuntary activations.

But a lot of advancements have been made recently that make homerow mods MUCH easier to use.

Urob has a config that uses several unmerged ZMK features that have made the feature work flawlessly for me the past few days.

He describes how it all works here.

Trying them is quite simple, but urob’s config repo is using macros for ZMK that might make it a bit difficult to adopt it to your own, regular ZMK config.

But you can use mine as an example:

  1. Switch your config to use urob’s zmk fork as I did in this commit
  2. Add zmk-nodefree-config to your repo to make key position definitions easier
  3. Add the homerow mod behaviors like I did here
  4. Add the hm_l, hm_r, hm_shift_l, hm_shift_r behaviors to your keymap

Reflash your keyboard and you should be good to go.

2. Try his combo improvements

While you are at it, you can also try his combo improvements.

The new global-quick-tap-ms = <75>; settings makes it so that if any key was pressed within 75ms before the combo hit, the combo won’t be run and instead the keys will register as taps.

This significantly reduces accidental activations during typing and made combos finally usable for me.

3. Try num word (caps word for numbers)

This one has been a game changer for me. I put it as a tap on my right outer thumb and now after tapping the key, I can just start typing numbers with my left side num pad layer.

The layer automatically deactivates as soon as I hit any key except for numbers, dot, comma, star, slash, plus, minus and equal.

So I can press my <&num_word> key and type 20/5=4 and the number layer automatically turns off as soon as I type the space.

You can also use it with any other layer using his smart-layers-for-zmk feature.

I am loving it for my nav layer to. I activate it using a tap dance.

BONUS: caksoylar’s keymap-drawer

And finally another cool software (that is not made by urob) you may also be interested.

It’s a python script that generates a pretty keymap graphic directly from your ZMK repo.

I have added some shell and python scripts to automate it further so that I can easily keep updated graphics of my keymap.