QMK is fiddly, but VIA's web app couldn't really be much easier for the common suff.
You just visit https://usevia.app in a modern browser and plug in your keyboard. Remapping keys, creating layers, and creating simple macros is easy using the GUI, and changes take effect right away.
I am curious as to what you can do with the M60 using Python, though. Do you have any example off the top of your head, of things that are hard to do with QMK/VIA?
One thing I have always wanted to do is conditionalize the keyboard's functionality based on external state (e.g. use different RGB color schemes depending on environmental ambient light, or on data returned from some external service). Stuff like that is not generally feasible on a keyboard, but it seems like it might be doable with the nRF52840 in this keyboard(?).
On my M60 keyboard, I can switch back and forth between USB and bluetooth with a single button press, which is super nice for running two PCs at once. When I switch, the color of the keyboard lighting switches too, so I can tell at a glance which computer the keyboard is connected to. All of that was easy by just tweaking some of the Python code that shows up as an external USB drive.
But with QMK/Via, you can't really tweak much on the VIA app. And the app itself is fiddly, where for my keyboard at least you have to select an old version and load a configuration file every time you want to tweak something. And it seems like you can't actually change much with the backlight, and there is no way to change the USB/Bluetooth state by key (at least on my keyboard).
To go deeper with QWK/Via, I'd have to recompile the firmware. Which is fine I suppose, but I'd also have to track down exactly what version of QMK my keyboard uses and get the code, if it's even available. Then I'd have to deal with a re-flashing process and a risk of bricking it. It's a much bigger headache than just tweaking some scripts on an external drive.
Recent versions of the VIA electron app have not worked for me for mysterious reasons (mysterious because it does not report errors) so it basically only works in Chrome, which I do not use.
So if I get fed up with recompiling and reflashing QMK, I plan to take a closer look at Vial https://get.vial.today/
You just visit https://usevia.app in a modern browser and plug in your keyboard. Remapping keys, creating layers, and creating simple macros is easy using the GUI, and changes take effect right away.
I am curious as to what you can do with the M60 using Python, though. Do you have any example off the top of your head, of things that are hard to do with QMK/VIA?
One thing I have always wanted to do is conditionalize the keyboard's functionality based on external state (e.g. use different RGB color schemes depending on environmental ambient light, or on data returned from some external service). Stuff like that is not generally feasible on a keyboard, but it seems like it might be doable with the nRF52840 in this keyboard(?).