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Any advice for getting started in QMK? I'm an experienced programmer, so every tutorial that starts with git and the basics of C is frustrating, but I don't hav

Any advice for getting started in QMK? I'm an experienced programmer, so every tutorial that starts with git and the basics of C is frustrating, but I don't have a lot of experience with hardware, keyboards, etc. For example, I have no idea what "keystroke inner loop" you're referring to - where can I read more about that?

technomancy 7y ago
The docs for using QMK are pretty good, but trying to actually understand the code made my head spin; that's why I decided to write my own firmware. Right now it doesn't have any of the fancy features of QMK, but it currently clocks in at under 200 lines, so I have a suspicion it'd be easier to implement those features from scratch in Microscheme than understand their current implementation in QMK.
- Syzygies 7y ago
  There's a middle ground. One wants to take advantage of the prior work supporting all these keyboards, while improving and/or making more understandable the core keystroke processing logic. Develop a user language for this logic, that translates to C code that can be included in QMK?
  - technomancy 7y ago
    If the root problem with QMK is that there are too many moving parts, adding a completely new language and compiler into the mix seems like a step in the wrong direction. The extra features that QMK has and Menelaus doesn't aren't really all that appealing to me to begin with.
Syzygies 7y ago
process_record_user() Reading the documentation is a good start, but one needs to experiment. Search the code base. The project also contains hundreds of calls to this routine; one can see what others did. In my youth I coauthored a computer algebra system, but my contributions were all core code, inner loops, not close to the user interface. Yet many people managed to hack our system successfully. I had no meaningful advantage over them when I needed to do this myself, but their example spurred me to learn. Same with flunking my quals, first semester of my PhD program. The older students would tear through the questions in five minutes, at tea after each miserable day of testing. With this experience in mind, I doubled my scores the next semester. One really has to just dive into the code, and others do this.

technomancy 7y ago

The docs for using QMK are pretty good, but trying to actually understand the code made my head spin; that's why I decided to write my own firmware. Right now it doesn't have any of the fancy features of QMK, but it currently clocks in at under 200 lines, so I have a suspicion it'd be easier to implement those features from scratch in Microscheme than understand their current implementation in QMK.

Syzygies 7y ago
There's a middle ground. One wants to take advantage of the prior work supporting all these keyboards, while improving and/or making more understandable the core keystroke processing logic. Develop a user language for this logic, that translates to C code that can be included in QMK?
- technomancy 7y ago
  If the root problem with QMK is that there are too many moving parts, adding a completely new language and compiler into the mix seems like a step in the wrong direction. The extra features that QMK has and Menelaus doesn't aren't really all that appealing to me to begin with.

Syzygies 7y ago

process_record_user() Reading the documentation is a good start, but one needs to experiment. Search the code base. The project also contains hundreds of calls to this routine; one can see what others did. In my youth I coauthored a computer algebra system, but my contributions were all core code, inner loops, not close to the user interface. Yet many people managed to hack our system successfully. I had no meaningful advantage over them when I needed to do this myself, but their example spurred me to learn. Same with flunking my quals, first semester of my PhD program. The older students would tear through the questions in five minutes, at tea after each miserable day of testing. With this experience in mind, I doubled my scores the next semester. One really has to just dive into the code, and others do this.