easy way to implement autoshift

[aless3]

I'm sorry if this feature is already present, in that case kindly point me to the right direction because i didn't find it!

also i don't know if this is the right place to ask, in case feel free to move/close this and point me to the right place.

a thing i love from qmk is the autoshift
https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/blob/master/docs/feature_auto_shift.md
that is the ability to hold a bit more a key to execute the shifted version of that key (depending on what you like you can include or exclude modifier keys from this behaviour).

from what i understand i may be a le to reach such a state with a lot of tap-hold-press, but it would make the config file really difficult to manager and change (at least for me).
is there a way to implement that in another less difficult way?

thank you.

[jtroo]

Thanks for the starting the discussion :) . This feature is indeed not present. The action that seems to fit the auto_shift behaviour the closest seems to be tap-hold-press-timeout with normal lowercase letters on tap+hold and uppercase on the timeout, maybe even a (macro S-<letter>) to prevent unintended extra shifts, though this would disable key repeat. For example:

(defalias
  a (tap-hold-press-timeout 150 150 a a (macro S-a))
  b (tap-hold-press-timeout 150 150 b b (macro S-b))
  ;; ... so on
)

I currently have no plans to implement this, but PRs would be welcome.

If you know a bit of scripting, I think generating a config with lots of these shouldn't be too difficult, but I understand it would take a lot of time for people who don't currently have the knowledge. Maybe instead of complicating the kanata codebase and configuration documentation, I could write up some example configs/config generation scripts for stuff like this.

[aless3]

sorry for the late reply, here I am
I made a stupid and naive python script to automate the process (I piped its output to a file and put it in the defalias sectiton of my cfg):

chars = "`1234567890[]',.pyfgcrl/=\\aoeuidhtns-;qjkxbmwvz"
for char in chars:
    print ('{0} (tap-hold-press-timeout 150 150 {0} {0} (macro S-{0}))'.format(char))

after that I added the alias for the grv key and now I am using it flawlessly

do you think such a long config file may affect performance? the laptop I am using is very old, and don't know anything of rust

thank you for this work!

[MatthewNichols]

Thanks, this approach worked well for me.

[jtroo]

There aren't any performance concerns with an increased number of special actions. They only take a little more memory, but it will hardly be noticeable. Kanata shouldn't use more than a few MBs.