Chrysalis
Downloads
About
Chrysalis is a graphical configurator for
Kaleidoscope-powered keyboards. While still under
development, it is already usable for a number of tasks. To try it,
you don't even need to flash Kaleidoscope
beforehand, Chrysalis
can do that for you, as it ships with reasonable default firmware
for each supported board.
The primary purpose of the application is to allow one to configure their keyboard without having to compile or flash firmware, by storing the configuration on the keyboard itself, in EEPROM. There are no external tools required, just Chrysalis itself.
Features
- Layout editor to edit the keymap on-the-fly, with the ability to copy one layer to another, and to set a default one.
- Colormap editor to edit the per-key LED colormap on boards that support it.
- Firmware upgrade to upload either the default, Chrysalis-enabled firmware that ships with the application, or a custom one.
Supported Hardware
Chrysalis supports the Keyboardio Model01, the Keyboardio Model100 and the Keyboardio Atreus.
The original Atreus, the ErgoDox EZ (and any other keyboard wired like it), and the SOFT/HRUF Splitography keyboards are also supported, as long as they run suitable firmware.
Supported operating systems
Chrysalis is primarily developed under Linux, but we target all three major operating systems, and test our releases on Windows and macOS too. That said, our testing is done on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Windows 10, and macOS Mojave.
The protocol Chrysalis uses to communicate with the keyboard requires USB serial support, which is known to be problematic on Windows prior to Windows 10.
Installation
From installer packages
Choose whether to install the production release, or a development snapshot from the links above, and from the release page, select the installer appropriate for your operating system.
macOS Homebrew
brew update && brew upgrade
brew install --cask chrysalis
Reporting issues
Chrysalis is alpha quality software. There will be bugs, missing features and non-obvious things. Reporting any and all of these help us make the software better, please feel free to open issues liberally!
Using custom firmware
While Chrysalis comes bundled with supported firmware files, it also supports
custom firmware, as long as it has a few Kaleidoscope plugins enabled:
FocusSerial to make it possible to communicate with the keyboard in
the first place, EEPROM-Settings to be able to store
configuration in EEPROM. The FocusSerial
plugin provides multiple plugins, and
Chrysalis needs Focus
, FocusEEPROMCommand
, and FocusSettingsCommand
all
enabled in the custom firmware's KALEIDOSCOPE_INIT_PLUGINS()
.
Additionally, for Chrysalis to be able to edit the keymap, the EEPROM-Keymap plugin is also required. Similarly, to configure the colormap, the custom firmware will need to have the Colormap plugin enabled.
If none of the bundled firmwares suit you, and you wish to customise them, or build one from scratch, you can do that, and doing so is fully supported!
Development
To launch the development environment, simply type yarn && yarn start
. To do a
production build, use yarn run build:all
, or limit it to a particular OS:
yarn run build:linux
, yarn run build:mac
or yarn run build:win
. See the
scripts
section of package.json
for more scripts.
Translations
We're using Weblate to manage and maintain translations.
Debugging
There are sample ENV file & debugging configurations provided in the dev/sample
directory. There is also an example launch.json for VSCode under the .vscode
directory under dev/sample/.vscode/launch.json
. To debug the main process, you may wish to launch from an IDE (without using the above in a terminal), configurations for VSCode are provided. If using the launch or compound configurations, the timeout
properties must allow enough time for the app to fully launch before the debugger(s) stop trying. In the case of compound, this applies to the renderer and main process debugger.
Note: The ports defined in your .env.development & your debugging configuration must match.