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Comment by rgoulter | Hacker News Reader

If you do desire "external keyboards, more than one, slightly different configurations for each one", ... then at that point I think it would be worth considering the benefits of a keyboard where the keyboard firmware itself can be customised.

With the customisable keyboard firmware, your tweaks would remain on the keyboard, & wouldn't need any setup on the OS.

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Config being saved in firmware I think is probably the most underrated boon of enthusiast keyboards. No shaky hacks or badly written background daemons, just plug it in anywhere there’s USB and the board acts as expected.

The downside of this approach is that you can’t easily do “one size fits all, inclusive of built-in laptop keyboard” mods.

Since my configuration files follow me from computer to computer anyway, it’s easier to just manage all the mods in one place and rely on the daemon. If I was doing support though, I would definitely go the firmware route.

Yeah that's fair, and not all daemons are equal — something like Karabiner for instance is manageable, but the software required for the various functions on big name (e.g. Logitech) peripherals can be downright horrendous.

Agreed. I do have that, but I also want to use the same keyboard with Mac, Linux, Windows. So far I've been switching keyboard configurations on the keyboard every time I use a different OS, but I'd like to move that to the OS so that it's automatic.

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