A guide to home row keyboard mods #Keyboards #Modding
If you’ve been browsing mechanical keyboard communities, and especially the niche that is ergonomic mechanical keyboards, you may have come across the term “home row mods” and wondered what could that mean…
The “home row” refers to the middle row of alpha keys. On an English QWERTY keyboard this would be ASDFGHJKL;. This row is called the “home row” because if one were to follow touch typing technique, this is the row of keys on which your fingers are supposed to rest on. The bars or the dish found on F and J help to find back the home position without looking at the keyboard — this is especially important for relatively big keyboards which require you to move your hands to hit some of the keys like for example Backspace or the arrow keys on a classic TKL and thus throw you off home position.
“mods” refer to modifiers, that is to say ⇧ Shift, ⎈ Control, ⎇ Alt, and ◆ GUI. The last modifier in the list is also known as WinKey on Windows, Command on MacOS or Super/Meta on Linux and BSD. It is not to be confused with actual graphical user interfaces.
So this means that “home row mods” are about placing modifiers on the home row.
How can that be possible? Does this mean that the home row letters/symbols swap positions with the modifier keys? Most certainly not! You see, one of the untapped potential of modifiers that are active as long as you hold them is that they don’t do anything useful when they’re tapped (i.e. pressed and released) on their own — a notable exception is the Win/Super key which opens the start menu on Windows and Gnome and Alt which pops up the menu in graphical apps — but thanks to software like QMK, we can turn these momentary switch modifiers into dual-role keys which act as modifiers when held but act as other keys when tapped. This allows us to make more with less.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
