| My advice to you is to get either a Keychron Q10 or Q11, then get a Ploopy trackball to place between/below the keyboard. https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-q11-qmk-custom-me... https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-q10-alice-layout-... https://ploopy.co/mini-trackball/ <-- this one has buttons and a scroll wheel. I have a Keychron Q10 and program it with the "via" software, which works great. I also have a Ploopy mouse, which requires QMK compilation to customize. That worked out great for me, because I love tinkering. It's really difficult to encapsulate all that goes into a keyboard and mouse/trackball, like you said the communities create huge amounts of information, commentary, and designs. Which is why companies like Keychron are doing great work creating "layman" accessible keyboards. QMK is literally compiling C code into firmware. You can leave off LED effects if you want, use complex macros, rules, and layers, or cut out everything that you don't use. I mentioned my mouse earlier: it has 2 layers, the second of which is accessed by holding down a button. That gives me access to almost twice as many buttons! I have a volume control on my mouse's second layer, plus "paste plain text on MacOS". Very cool stuff and incredibly useful! Via is a QMK that is designed to be updated without the C toolchain present. It uses an Electron front end and is pretty straightforward to use. Obviously it's more restricted in what it can do, but I think it covers 99.9% of use cases. I wish I could write more, but I have to go for surgery. If you ask questions here, I should be able to respond by late evening US eastern time May 1st. |