A Tour of Chrysalis
This will be a short tour of Chrysalis, showing what it can do, and how. It's not an exhaustive tour, and may not be entirely up to date either, but it provides more information than a single screenshot in the README.
When Chrysalis starts up, it will look for supported keyboards, and will display a menu of available ones. If no supported keyboards are connected, it will say so, too.
Just for reference, the main menu on the left side. Some of the items on the menu require a connected keyboard, and are not shown unless connected.
Before diving into the more interesting parts, lets get the simpler things out of the way, starting with preferences.
In the User Interface part of Preferences, we can customise the look of Chrysalis, like switching between Light and Dark mode (there'll be a dark mode screenshot later), enabling automatic updates (of Chrysalis itself, and the firmware files separately), choosing the layout used on the operating system side, and a couple of other things. The descriptions should be pretty self explanatory.
The My Keyboard part of Preferences deal with settings stored on your keyboard, and as such, require a connected keyboard. These are settings that aren't strictly tied to the key- or colormap, such as LED brightness, LED Idle time, the default layer, and so on. These are settings you can tweak that don't translate to keymap changes.
In most cases, you won't need to visit the developer tools sub-page. Verbose logs are enabled by default, and the developer console can also be opened with Control+Shift+I (or Command+Option+I on macOS).
The Firmware update screen is for - as the name implies - updating firmware. It displays your current firmware version (if that information is available), the latest firmware version Chrysalis shipped with (or downloaded), and offers a way to flash custom firmware too. The screen also allows you to view the changelog of the latest firmware.
The screenshot doesn't really do this justice. The goal of this screen is to print it, and hang it on the wall to aid in learning a new layout.
The primary screen of Chrysalis, where most time will likely be spent. This is the screen we land on when connecting to a keyboard.
The keyboard is displayed in the main area, with a floating, draggable key picker at the bottom, and a sidebar of available keys on the right side. By default, features not available in the running firmware are hidden from the sidebar, but this can be changed in Preferences.
Changes are not saved immediately. They are only committed to the keyboard's EEPROM when you press the save button in the lower left corner of Chrysalis. Changes can be discarded by clicking the "X" button on the top bar. The "X" replaces the hamburger menu button when there are unsaved changes, screenshots will below will show this, too.
You can augment any of the standard keys with modifiers - even multiple modifiers, without the use of macros, right from Chrysalis. This lets you create keys that input, say, ! or similar symbols, and put them on a symbol layer. Or as in this screenshot below, on the top row. Or anywhere else you wish to. You can create a Ctrl+Alt+L or Super+L key to lock your screen easily, for example.
If the selected key is a modifier key, this section lets you turn it into a Sticky (OneShot) modifier, too:
Secondary actions lets you configure different behaviour for a single key depending on whether it was tapped, or if it is held. This allows you to put modifiers on the home row: you simply need to hold them. It also allows you to have them work as a layer shift when held. Both are shown in screenshots below.
On keyboards that have LEDs, you can edit at 16-color palette, and assign colors to each key. You can select a color from the palette, and use the selector below to configure which color should be used for the selected palette entry. When you select a key on the main keyboard and click a color in the palette, the key will be assigned the clicked palette entry.
N.B. for these colours to be active, you need to be in LED mode 14. You can either select this in Preferences/My Keyboard/LEDs/Default led mode, or press the "led" key 14 times on the keyboard.
Shifting, Locking to, moving to layers? Those are all right here, along with OneShot layers, which Chrysalis labels as "Layer shift for next action", to not require prior knowledge of terminology.
Your keyboard can act as a mouse too, so your hands never need to leave the comfort of the keyboard. You can even do a binary search over your screen using Mouse Warp keys! These do not entirely replace the need for a pointing device, but they do make it possible to reach out to one less often.
Dynamic Macros are macros that are stored in the EEPROM of your keyboard, macros that are editable directly from within Chrysalis. They are more limited than firmware macros, which can execute arbitrary code too, but they can be quite powerful nevertheless.
