Tap Dance

Tap dance is a way to allow a single physical key to work as multple logical keys / actions without using layers. With basic tap dance, you can trigger these "nested" keys or macros through a series of taps of the physical key within a given timeout.

The resulting "logical" action works just like any other key - it can be pressed and immediately released, or it can be held. For example, let's take a key KC.TD(KC.A, KC.B). If the tap dance key is tapped and released once quickly, the letter "a" will be sent. If it is tapped and released twice quickly, the letter "b" will be sent. If it is tapped once and held, the letter "a" will be held down until the tap dance key is released. If it is tapped and released once quickly, then tapped and held (both actions within the timeout window), the letter "b" will be held down until the tap dance key is released.

To use this, you may want to define a tap_time value in your keyboard configuration. This is an integer in milliseconds, and defaults to 300.

You'll then want to create a sequence of keys using KC.TD(KC.SOMETHING, KC.SOMETHING_ELSE, MAYBE_THIS_IS_A_MACRO, WHATEVER_YO), and place it in your keymap somewhere. The only limits on how many keys can go in the sequence are, theoretically, the amount of RAM your MCU/board has, and how fast you can mash the physical key. Here's your chance to use all that button-mash video game experience you've built up over the years.

NOTE: Currently our basic tap dance implementation has some limitations that are planned to be worked around "eventually", but for now are noteworthy:

The behavior of momentary layer switching within a tap dance sequence is currently "undefined" at best, and will probably crash your keyboard. For now, we strongly recommend avoiding KC.MO (or any other layer switch keys that use momentary switch behavior - KC.LM, KC.LT, and KC.TT)
Super fancy stuff like sending a keypress only when the leader key is released (perhaps based on how long the leader key was held) is unsupported - an example usecase might be "tap for Home, hold for Shift"

Here's an example of all this in action:

# user_keymaps/some_silly_example.py
from kmk.boards.klarank import Firmware
from kmk.keycodes import KC
from kmk.macros.simple import send_string

keyboard = Firmware()

keyboard.tap_time = 750

EXAMPLE_TD = KC.TD(
    KC.A,  # Tap once for "a"
    KC.B,  # Tap twice for "b"
    # Tap three times to send a raw string via macro
    send_string('macros in a tap dance? I think yes'),
    # Tap four times to toggle layer index 1
    KC.TG(1),
)

keyboard.keymap = [[ ...., EXAMPLE_TD, ....], ....]

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Tap Dance

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