Introducing Tap Flow

Hi |FNAME|,

Spring has sprung in Ontario! And do you know what spring brings? That's right: New advanced settings in Oryx! This month's update is an advanced setting called Tap Flow, making its way into Oryx from QMK. See more on this feature below and in the launch blog post. It's super easy to try — just one click in Oryx.

Another key improvement (see what I did there?!) is around dual-function keys that do one thing when you tap and another thing when you hold them down. You can read more about this below as well.

Spring is also a lovely time for travel, and so our own lead designer, Jo Williams, took a trip to Japan. She set up a meetup for ZSA users, and you can read all about it here and see photos and a short video from the meetup. She also created two lovely video interviews with users in Japan as part of our Spaces series, which you'll get to see in the coming months.

The typ.ing leaderboard for April:

y60xz43p in first place (for the second month running) with a 91wpm average at 94% accuracy across 30 challenges completed. Even better than their March result.
tbekolay: 86wpm at 91% accuracy, 30 challenges completed
zedkaido: 105wpm at 98% accuracy (!) but "only" 26 challenges completed.

Also, a correction on last month's issue: The excellent featured layout, Blaze Split, was created by Nikush Patel — the newsletter went out crediting the wrong user (but was fixed later).

Finally, a small confession: It's hard to stay authentic while producing "content" (not a word I love) that's supposed to come out on schedule. And so, this month, there's no ZSA Loves post. I have some ideas, but nothing that felt powerful and genuine enough to share with you. It's nice not to "have to" write a post no matter what. Keeps it real.

As always, thank you for reading, and thanks to those of you who reply to this email with thoughts and feedback. ❤️

All the best,
Erez

Introducing Tap Flow

Stop activating home-row mods accidentally

The latest feature to make its way from QMK into Oryx is another great one from our friend Pascal Getreuer. Tap Flow is a quick setting that makes your keyboard prefer sending the tap action when you hit a tap/hold dual-function key in the middle of typing. The team has been using it for a while and now you can, too.

Dual-function keys now make sense

Because some things should be simple

A dual-function key does one thing when you tap it, and something else when you hold it. This was not always the case – there were many cases where keys with a tap and a hold were implemented as Tap Dances in code. Now they're all "real" dual-function keys. This makes layouts easier to use, and timings more consistent and responsive.

Featured User Interview

Juan Hernandez

Controls Engineer

Not only is his setup cool, Juan gives us a little glimpse behind the scenes showing how industrial automation products are made (custom robots!).

"My desk starts with a Craftsman rolling toolbox on which a five-foot laminate desktop has been attached using 8020 aluminum extrusion."

Layout of the month

main.oskar

This layout is designed to minimize layers, making it easy to learn while maintaining ergonomic comfort. At its core, the layout consists of a base layer plus two additional layers. So you only have to learn three layers!! It's ideal for programmers, Vim users, and everyday tasks, with a few added conveniences. You can easily copy this layout but Windows/Linux users might want to replace a few keys in places I have noted.

Things we liked

Most Recommended Books →

Discover books recommended by the world’s most influential people

On the one hand, the term “thought leader” makes me cringe. On the other hand, I do love a good book, especially non-fiction. This is an interesting attempt at non-algorithmic recommendations.

DeepWiki →

Reading QMK, or any other open repo

This is a free Web-based tool by Devin (an AI coding agent) that pulls in a GitHub repo, scans it, and lets you ask questions about it. You can go much deeper than what the docs include (I used it for a deep dive into USB endpoints). The answers include citations from the codebase itself, so you can read the code for yourself. Quite fun and interesting, and might make it easier to contribute to open-source projects.

Reviewing (Almost) All The Games on Mindsports →

So many good ones

This is a rare link for the newsletter, because I’m actually linking to a blog post rather than a tool. So, “content”. But what content! Dr. Eric Silverman took the time to try dozens of different abstract strategy games online (all of which can also be played offline with a board and simple components) and wrote an informative and compelling blurb about each, coupled with a rating. If you’re curious about abstract strategy games beyond Chess and Go, this is a great primer.

Reviewing (Almost) All The Games on Mindsports

Unsure Calculator →

Embracing uncertainty

This tool surfaces an interesting quirk in traditional calculators: They assume the inputs are known. But in real life, we often don’t know the exact values in our equation. For many practical questions (”How much can I expect to earn”) we have a range rather than one value. The Unsure Calculator makes it possible to work with many such ranges, and presents the results as a histogram. Web-based, free.

Feather →

Draw in 3D

Feather is an iPad app for sketching things in 3D. It’s unlike any other 3D app I’ve ever used (Plasticity, SketchUp, Blender). It’s aimed at a very specific low-fi aesthetic— you won’t be making any refined renders with this thing, but it’s an interesting way to get a rough concept out of your head and into an interactive 3D scene. I think it wants to be the crayon of 3D design. $15 one-time payment, not a subscription.