As a former QMK user, I owe it gratitude for getting me started in making my own keymaps. However after migrating to
Kaleidoscope several years ago the latter seems like a better system generally. This post is my attempt to flex on the merits of Kaleidoscope for hand coded key-maps. I don’t have experience with the associated graphical tool
Chrysalis which I understand has an even greater advantage over QMK equivalents. Kaleidoscope originated with
Keyboardio, a firm that specialises in Ergonomic keyboards, who wrote it to meet their own needs.
QMK encourages you to start by forking their repo: thereby downloading a massive directory of stuff just to build your own keymap. This also exposes you to the horrors of git. I managed to get the whole repo out of sync and eventually overwrite my own keymaps whilst trying to rebase everything. Kaleidoscope uses Arduino IDE.
I confess that Kaleidoscope and its use of Arduino did not seem intuitive when all I had known was QMK. At first I did not see why one would want to use Arduino’s austere looking IDE instead of choosing any text editor or IDE under QMK. But once used to it, this approach seems much more logical. Instead of getting into a pickle with Git, the IDE quietly keeps the tools for building key-maps up to date in the background. The reference layouts for your board are easy to access anytime in the file menu. Arduino’s self contained environment made a lot more sense after my own misadventures! In fact, when Arduino have made it their business to provide easy to use tools for building firmware and flashing microcontrollers, why would any firmware vendor wish to reinvent the wheel?
QMK does have its advantages stemming from being an industry standard of course. It supports almost all keyboards and I think bugs are fixed faster there due to currently having more developers. Before the advent of Chords on Kaleidoscope - which is better than the QMK system - there was MagicCombo which was hopeless for most purposes. So QMK used to be the only serious choice if you wanted to add key combos.
So if like me you have used both, what are your thoughts on QMK? Whilst my own preference is clear, I’d love to hear from QMK die-hards also. Perhaps you are inspired to give Kaleidoscope a go for your next layout or hardware?
Note that this is an edit of a
post I wrote on the Keyboardio forum, and thought I would share it here, since there seem to be no threads devoted to firmware comparison. In fact I would hazard a guess that few in the scene are aware there are viable alternatives to QMK, let alone some may be better!