Kinesis Advantage360 — layouts

Edit your Advantage360 (non-Pro) keyboard layout as plain text and push it over the keyboard's v-Drive. No Windows SmartSet app, no Wine.

Checked out with an LLM coding agent? .claude/skills/kinesis-adv360/SKILL.md teaches it the syntax and the safety rules — just ask it to change a key.

Requirements

Linux with udisks2 auto-mounting removable media (the v-Drive appears at /run/media/$USER/ADV360), and a host keyboard layout of English (US).

Use

$EDITOR layouts/layout1.txt      # keep CRLF line endings
./tools/push-layout.sh           # start this FIRST, it waits

Then press SmartSet + F1 (gear key, top-left of the right module) to connect the v-Drive. The script copies, syncs, md5-verifies, and backs up whatever it overwrote. Press SmartSet + F1 again to disconnect — that is what makes the firmware apply the layout.

Order matters: the keyboard stops sending keystrokes while the v-Drive is on, so you cannot run the command once it is mounted.

tools/push-layout.sh [file] [slot]	write a layout (default layouts/layout1.txt → slot 1)
tools/pull-layout.sh	snapshot the whole v-Drive into backups/
tools/vdrive-watch.sh	dump drive contents, input devices, kernel log — for debugging

Run pull-layout.sh before your first change so you have a known-good copy.

Syntax

See .claude/skills/kinesis-adv360/SKILL.md for the full rules and the vendor guide for the official reference (see below).

The short version — remaps are [position]>[action], macros are {trigger}>{action}…, and the four things that cause nearly every bug:

1. {-mod} presses, {+mod} releases. Backwards from how it reads.
2. Remaps cannot produce shifted characters — ( needs a macro.
3. A macro's trigger modifier is not passed through to its output.
4. Macros do not auto-repeat when held.

This repo's layout

layouts/layout1.txt is a personal config, included as a worked example. layouts/layout1.orig.txt is the pre-edit original.

Right thumb cluster:

key	unshifted	shifted
PgUp	(	<
PgDn	)	>

{pgup}>{s9}{x1}{-lshf}{9}{+lshf}
{lshf}{pgup}>{s9}{x1}{-lshf}{comm}{+lshf}
{pgdn}>{s9}{x1}{-lshf}{0}{+lshf}
{lshf}{pgdn}>{s9}{x1}{-lshf}{perd}{+lshf}

The number row carries no macros, so 9/0 stay plain digits with native (/) on shift and normal auto-repeat.

Notes

settings/settings.txt on the v-Drive selects the active profile — do not edit it.

The Windows SmartSet app was tried under Wine and abandoned: it launches but Save throws, because Wine reports the v-Drive as FIXED rather than REMOVABLE (/dev/sdc is root:disk 0660). Not worth pursuing — this repo does the same job directly.