J2

It's only a different front end to QMK, and QMK has no native support for more than a basic set of canned modes. I haven't played around with them much, I'm not a real backlight fan, but I thought they had more than a couple of modes that supported custom hues. I have modified my Keychron J2 to supp

I missed your requirements about needing to fit into Keychron's QMK boards. That's the "terrible software..." bit. :( Yeh, I'm familiar with Sunder, not only is it super expensive, but it's also out of stock as is normal for limited run custom kit. There was someone in OLKB who was working on open s

Gamepad emulation (the part you describe as "The harder I push, the more input") is available only on a few boards besides Wooting and all of them over your budget. The closest one to your budget with such functionality is Keychron K2/J2 HE, but I'm not really a fan of Keychron HE boards sinсe you c

I tried out the Glorious tactile magnetics at Microcenter and they were kind of only nominally tactile, which makes sense - a proper poppy tactile would make the whole variable actuation capability meaningless. I've been looking at the XVX Whisper rubber dome tactiles, but they're north-pole down an

You need to use tap-dance, but that requires building new firmware with the tap-dance codes built in, and then entering the hex for the code using ANY. Theoretically you could convert it from VIA (Launcher) to VIAL but that's a bit fraught because the Keychron code base has changed a lot. It should

The J2/J8 HE aren't even ZMK, they're completely proprietary. :( This seems to be the case with the HE 8K boards, too. It's a massive bummer. It's also baffling, because Keychron is stacking up a bunch of tech debt by not just sticking to one system. ZMK is cool, because it lets you store layouts on

Keychron J2 has north-facing sockets and if either of those protocols can be added as QMK modules the J2 source works (I've got custom lighting in mine). https://www.amazon.com/Keychron-Mechanical-Bluetooth-Hot-swappable-Compatible/dp/B0GLM99BVY Source: https://github.com/james-donkey/qmk_firmware/t

It could be the stuck key problem A somewhat plausible explanation is that the well-known stuck key problem affects the Esc key, and thus the keyboard is put into bootloader mode, as the Esc key is seen as held down during powerup. It could be tested by using special firmware where the Esc key metho