16 lines
1.6 KiB
Markdown
16 lines
1.6 KiB
Markdown
# Frequently Asked Questions
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## What is QMK?
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[QMK](https://github.com/qmk), short for Quantum Mechanical Keyboard, is a group of people building tools for custom keyboards. We started with the [QMK firmware](https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware), a heavily modified fork of [TMK](https://github.com/tmk/tmk_keyboard).
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## What Differences Are There Between QMK and TMK?
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TMK was originally designed and implemented by [Jun Wako](https://github.com/tmk). QMK started as [Jack Humbert](https://github.com/jackhumbert)'s fork of TMK for the Planck. After a while Jack's fork had diverged quite a bit from TMK, and in 2015 Jack decided to rename his fork to QMK.
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From a technical standpoint QMK builds upon TMK by adding several new features. Most notably QMK has expanded the number of available keycodes and uses these to implement advanced features like `S()`, `LCTL()`, and `MO()`. You can see a complete list of these keycodes in [Keycodes](keycodes.md).
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From a project and community management standpoint TMK maintains all the officially supported keyboards by himself, with a bit of community support. Separate community maintained forks exist or can be created for other keyboards. Only a few keymaps are provided by default, so users typically don't share keymaps with each other. QMK encourages sharing of both keyboards and keymaps through a centrally managed repository, accepting all pull requests that follow the quality standards. These are mostly community maintained, but the QMK team also helps when necessary.
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Both approaches have their merits and their drawbacks, and code flows freely between TMK and QMK when it makes sense.
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