What’s the most important tip for using home row mods? Get into the habit of typing with quick, swift taps.
That doesn’t sound good 
I am also not confident about usability of tap-hold based modifier switches. Will have to try and see.
Alternatively I thought of using combo approach, where for ctrl you’d hit f and j at same time and release just one of them leaving the other key pressed. That would bypass the timing sensitivity of the “tap dance” approach.
EDIT:
Tested the chording approach and hand switching is too awkard. Don’t think it’s worth getting used to it, as that seemed too straining on hands. Will test chording + sticky keys, where fj toggles shifted mode and perhaps have esc cancel all stickied mods.
Alternatively I thought of using combo approach, where for ctrl you’d hit f and j at same time and release just one of them leaving the other key pressed. That would bypass the timing sensitivity of the “tap dance” approach.
You can maybe give the thumb-combos a try, described in this section.
What’s the most important tip for using home row mods? Get into the habit of typing with quick, swift taps.
That doesn’t sound good
Like I said I also don’t use this currently, but this article is definitely the best resource I have come across for anyone that is curious. What I hear from other people that use it is some behavior modification is necessary, so it is a non-trivial investment. In ergonomic improvements there is always some investment necessary though, whether it is switching keyboard layouts, or physical keyboard shapes (split, columnar stagger, number of keys etc).
I set up kmonad with home row mods a few days ago and so far it works really well, especially with kakoune. However, it only clicked for me after I thoroughly read the whole config tutorial. I added some more layers already for braces and so on …
The thing I still need getting used to is that now some of the home row keys only print on release, instead of press. But I have the feeling this overall improves my typing as it gets “lighter” (don’t know a better word, sorry).
Thank you so much @bravekarma for the link!!
1 Like
Thanks you for the feedback !
Don’t you miss-press sometime and get an unwanted behavior ?
So far it didn’t after a few days. I think it helps that kmonad has tab-hold-next-release. You can try out the different tab modifiers.
1 Like
For a completely different approach that I found interesting, here is a QMK keymap which does not use hold-tap behavior at all: https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/tree/master/users/callum
It is a keymap for only 34 keys where everything is accessible without relying on double function (hold-tap) keys. Its main idea is to put the modifiers are on the home row, but not on the main layer. They are “one shot” (sticky), so that you can tap them and it will act on the next non-modifier keypress, without having to be held. They are also available on one hand of all the other layers, so you can combine with any key.
This is unfortunately just for QMK but it might also be possible to implement in kmonad if it supports sticky keys.
2 Likes
An update after using it for some weeks at work @scr .
Sometimes I do get false-negatives and false-positives. It happens about twice a day (with an 8-hour work day). However, the comfort outweighs the annoyance. At least for me. I prefer working at a computer with kmonad over a computer without 
3 Likes