Writing Colemak on a Mechanical Keyboard

My transition to writing almost exclusively on a 60% mechanical keyboard (Anne Pro 2) mapped with the Colemak layout is complete 🥰

Here are some things I wouldn’t want to miss and weren’t immediately obvious to me, so maybe they’re helpful to somebody else, too.

1. Removing the right ctrl key in favor of a 2nd cmd key is a good idea when working on MacOS, where cmd is way more common than ctrl.
2. Tap mapping is genius. It allows you to let certain keys behave differently when hit shorter than a configurable threshold. (I’ve set the sensitivity to <150 ms and never looked back)
3. Having CapsLock as Magic Fn2 and as a second backspace on short tap is a game changer to access Fn2 functions on the right side while still having easy access to backspace on the left.
4. Having Escape work as backtick/tilde on short tap is a must.
5. Making F1-F12 accessible with Fn2 instead of Fn1 makes it more convenient to control volume and brightness (on Mac) because I moved Fn2 to the edge.
6. Using dead keys for German umlauts is nicer than anticipated.
7. It’s better to not reprogram the layout to Colemak. Because if you do so, you’ll need to switch layouts on the OS level every time you use another keyboard that has not been reprogrammed. (Such a pain if you’re on a laptop and need to login using the wrong layout)
8. Applies to both Colemak and US layout, but coming from a German layout, this is a huge shift: writing code is way more ergonomic with the special character placement. That alone is well worth the time