I’m really struggling with how to lay out my additional layers.
Where should I put brackets of all kinds, parentheses, underscore, dash, hash, back tick? Should I have a numpad? I just can’t decide and wonder if there’s already a moderately consensus best practice?
once you get into ergo (or split ergo), this becomes a LOT more personal – you put symbols where you will find them or where you expect them to be – adjust for whatever layout (QWERTY, Dvorak, Colemak-DH, etc.) you are using and then pile on macros and optimizations to cover whatever programming languages you are working in …
Thanks this is solid advice - at least I know I’m not reinventing the wheel.
Those links were great and I’ve read them all. I hadn’t thought about, or heard the term, bigrams before.
After reading these I think I’ve decided to keep my symbol layer separate from my numpad layer too.
As others have mentioned, it’s very much personal preference. I program with 34 keys every day with three primary layers: colemak dh, numpad, and nav. After having used Miryoku for almost two years, I’ve been using Callum-style mods for the past several months, and I really, really like it.
I’d recommend taking a look at keymaps in the QMK repo – especially for layouts similar to the board you’re using. You could also search github for zmk-config repos. It’s a different firmware, but layout is layout.
Miryoku is the layout I see referenced most often. Lots of people just do their own, as the other commenter noted.