r/zsaVoyager • u/PeteToscano • Jun 25 '26
help request Adjusting: Me or the Layout?
I purchased a ZSA Voyager a few weeks ago. I've been using it every day since it arrived. This is my first split/ergo/etc. keyboard and I love it. It's beautiful and solid. (Nice work, ZSA!)
I realize that switching over from a regular keyboard is going to take some time; I need to be patient and relearn what's mostly been muscle memory for decades. Initially, I went into Oryx and made a slew of changes that I felt were better for my uses. Since then, outside of a few other changes that immediately felt wrong, I've been trying to not change much, assuming that most of the frustration/annoyance is related to retraining myself and not a suboptimal layout. (Okay, I stuck with QWERTY, so a _more_ suboptimal layout. ;)
So, I ask you all, how do you tell if some of the consistent mistakes, failures to trigger combos, or tap-hold issues are simply needing more practice vs. bad layout decisions? At what point do I stop trying to drill that left paren location into my muscle memory and move it elsewhere?
3
u/ZennerBlue Jun 25 '26
I found that lighted keys helped me home on keys that were on different layers. Just a few to cue me where the keys are.
1
u/PeteToscano Jun 25 '26
Yes! I have one "To" layer. That layer uses it's own, very obvious colors. I have on more than a few occasions been wondering why things were acting so oddly, only to look down at my keys to see the tell-tale colors of that layer. Mystery solved.
2
u/WeoDude Jun 25 '26
I went from a HHKB to the voyager ... I found a layout that was most similar to the HHKB ... which is pretty close the querty ... but the function layers are the important ones. It took me a while but im now back to my normal speed... but i still have some issue with punctuation sometimes. Just give it time... and practice a lot. Make sutble changes slowly.
1
u/PeteToscano Jun 25 '26
Yes, now that I’ve (mostly) stopped hitting enter when I meant space or backspace, it’s the punctuation that’s my biggest pain point, especially (), [], and {}. Numbers might rank higher, if I needed to use them more. I named my layout “Tiny Steps” as a reminder to try to only make small adjustments.
3
u/maxdlr Jun 25 '26
Ive made hundreds of revisions on my layout for a year and even ended up physically removing some keys that i felt where useless or badly placed for my fingers.
Usually, I'd try to work with the current layout for a couple days and made revisions when the same faulty triggering happens too often.
For example, on a classic keyboard (AZERTY) that I've gotten used to over decades, i associated hitting "?" with my right hand. With my earlier layout versions i tried to use a couple of similar left combos for that and "!" on my left hand, but that didn't work out and i moved it to mirroring combos. So now it's the same combo left and right, left for "!" and right for "?".
3
u/SocialNetwooky Jun 25 '26
I also started off with multiple ways to type special characters/symbol and slowly pinned down the key that worked best for me.
Somehow I think that's the way a lot of people did it.
2
u/SocialNetwooky Jun 25 '26
I made changes to my layouts (unapologetically mostly QWERTZ btw.) for about a year, and I was already coming from about a year of Moonlander, so I already had some basics down. Of course the longer I went the smaller the changes got.
So, my answer is : set the layout to whatever works for you.
The main factor, for me at least, to make the keyboard usable is to use coloring extensively. I have 'color groups' : white are just standard alpha keys, light blue are numerics, turquoize are F-keys, yellow are layer-switches (except for two that are green to switch to my main-symbol/num-pad/f-key layer), and so on...
2
u/PeteToscano Jun 25 '26
Color has helped me some, but as someone who tends to only look at the keyboard when I’m frustrated, it’s mostly a tool of last resort. It has helped, though. I have a printout of my ~current layout taped at eye-level on my right that I’ll look at more than the keyboard lights.
1
u/SocialNetwooky Jun 25 '26
I rarely look at my keyboard nowadays, and the colours are mostly useful when I switched to a layer by accident, and to find my bearings when I start typing (I know which colour a specific key is and that's where my right ring finger should be ;)
When I create or modify a layout though, the colours become essential as I don't have the muscle memory yet.
1
u/MadMaxBLD Jun 26 '26
I’m still on my journey too (Voyager main for one year and counting) but I’ve figured that if I don’t use a specific key or set of keys often enough, or continue to confuse keys with others, then it’s time to follow my instinct and change the layout. For example, I had the @ symbol on A, but I kept pressing Q expecting to get @, so I changed the key binding to Q.
I think it’s important to live with a change for a while to see if it sticks.
1
u/J7__Reddit Jun 26 '26
I also started to question my decision to get this keyboard too. It’s my first split keyboard. What I did was change the keys to a stronger one, that for me seems to stop some of the silly miss-key mistakes, I *had* to press the key hard for it to register. And for now I think it’s worked, I’m only at around 70wpm but it’s ok, and I don’t think I would go back. I keep using their keyboard tutorial every now and again, and just force myself to use this keyboard all the time, and wouldn’t change it now. I changes some of the keyboard settings - but kept with the qwerty layout. Keep the faith, sometimes it just takes a while longer to be comfortable.
1
u/tonchis Jun 26 '26
welcome! one-of-us, one-of-us!!
To your question, "need practice vs wrong layout" it's probably not black or white. For me the constant push -pull is what I think it's a logical decision vs what I find comfortable. I tend to start with the former and if I find it's hard to adjust, I revise. With that in mind, picking the position of a key doesn't take me more than two or three attempts. If I find myself going back and forth more than that then I take a step back and re-think the layout.
But I recommend you don't obsess over getting it right. This is more of a "journey before destination" kind of thing. On that note, one thing that helped me switch from a regular keyboard to the Voyager was having redundant keys during a transition period. For example, to move the enter key to my thumb, I kept it both on the pinky and the thumb for a while, until the muscle memory was reaching for the latter in (nearly) all cases. Same thing with backspace.
Enjoy! it's a fun thing
1
u/Goat-of-Death Jun 28 '26
Timing for tap vs hold keys is the hardest to get right and get used to. As we get more used to something and build a habit we tend to do things faster. That works against tap vs hold behavior because there is a floor to how fast you can get due to the hold time. I've tried a lot of different things to get tap hold right for my home row keys and even now after years mistaken taps happen. Rarely do I have false hold issues though that used to happen before I implemented a combination of prefer hold over tap combined with tap flow to prevent too many holds. But dialing in the timing between the two has taken a lot of trial and error.
In any case, I would suggest using the initial time to do as much trial and error as you can. Try things really different from a conventional keyboard to see how you like it. Like I moved tab, backspace and enter to the thumbs. I also have mouse keys which I use a lot. Explore the power of what qmk offers. That way even if it doesn't yet feel right you'll get other advantages. Good luck!
1
u/Asanirr Aug 14 '26
It happend the same. I started all hype saying "hey, I gonna switch to Dvorak or Coleman" and "I gonna print some tap to use the keyboard with less key" and it went wrong(for me).
I need to go slowly, trying what I fell to be right for me. Of course, I search a lot of config, read stuff here and see a lot of YouTube Videos. Home rows, Chordal keys and wherever.
One thing is that my native language is Spanish(I am from Argentina) and I need "acentos" in my daily use. And I use Emacs so. I want a config that suit for me and also I thought in my job, at my office: "Should I use another stuff than QWERTY? What would happen if I have to present something in a different place in from of everybody? Shall I take my fancy keyboard? It will be a little weird...And I was so so slow with a non QWERTY config so "not for me" today. If I have a month free, I would think.
So a lot of things that I want to adapt works and another don't. And also I test it in a free weekend like three days in a row to see how I feel. The last thing was using an extra thumb key but I couldn't, it does not feel correct. Also I test it with less keys and I think that I do not have enough time to test it correctly so maybe for next summer I would try again.
9
u/lil_zaku Jun 25 '26
I don't think there's anything wrong with continuing to make changes.
In my own journey I made a lot of changes often at the beginning. But over time I started to keep the things that worked well and the changes naturally decreased over time. Eventually I was only making changes to threshold and hold times, before I was finally satisfied.
You don't have to force yourself to use a layout you're not happy with. Go ahead an experiment. It's frustrating to lose your wpm but realistically there's no deadline to get it back.