qmk/docs/feature_userspace.md

Userspace: Sharing Code Between Keymaps

If you use more than one keyboard with a similar keymap, you might see the benefit in being able to share code between them. Create your own folder in users/ named the same as your keymap (ideally your github username, <name>) with the following structure:

• /users/<name>/ (added to the path automatically)
  • readme.md (optional, recommended)
  • rules.mk (included automatically)
  • <name>.h (optional)
  • <name>.c (optional)
  • config.h (optional)

<name>.c will need to be added to the SRC in rules.mk like this:

SRC += <name>.c

Additional files may be added in the same way - it's recommended you have one named <name>.c/.h though.

All this only happens when you build a keymap named <name>, like this:

make planck:<name>

For example,

make planck:jack

Will include the /users/jack/ folder in the path, along with /users/jack/rules.mk.

Additionally, config.h here will be processed like the same file in your keymap folder. This is handled separately from the <name>.h file.

The reason for this, is that <name>.h won't be added in time to add settings (such as #define TAPPING_TERM 100), and including the <name.h> file in any config.h files will result in compile issues.

So you should use the config.h for QMK settings, and the <name>.h file for user or keymap specific settings.

/users/<name>/rules.mk will be included in the build after the rules.mk from your keymap. This allows you to have features in your userspace rules.mk that depend on individual QMK features that may or may not be available on a specific keyboard. For example, if you have RGB control features shared between all your keyboards that support RGB lighting, you can define RGB_ENABLE in your keymap rules.mk and then check for the variable in your userspace rules.mk like this:

ifdef RGB_ENABLE
    # Include my fancy rgb functions source here
endif

Because of this, any time you turn on QMK features in your users/<name>/rules.mk, you should conditionally enable them only if the flag isn't already defined, like this:

ifndef TAP_DANCE_ENABLE
    TAP_DANCE_ENABLE = yes
endif

This will ensure that you can explicitly turn off features for an individual keymap.

Readme

Please include authorship (your name, github username, email), and optionally a license that's GPL compatible.

Config.h

If you do add a config,h file, you want to make sure that it only gets processed once. So you may want to start off with something like this:

#ifndef USERSPACE_CONFIG_H
#define USERSPACE_CONFIG_H

// Put normal config.h settings here:

#endif // !USERSPACE_CONFIG_H

You can use any option hre that you could use in your keymap's config.h file. You can find a list of vales here.

Example

For a brief example, checkout /users/_example/ , or for a more detailed examples check out template.h and template.c in /users/drashna/ .

Consolidated Macros

If you wanted to consolidate macros and other functions into your userspace for all of your keymaps, you can do that. The issue is that you then cannot call any function defined in your userspace, or it gets complicated. To better handle this, you can call the functions here and create new functions to use in individual keymaps.

First, you'd want to go through all of your keymap.c files and replace process_record_user with process_record_keymap instead. This way, you can still use keyboard specific codes on those boards, and use your custom "global" keycodes as well. You'll also want to replace SAFE_RANGE with NEW_SAFE_RANGE so that you wont have any overlapping keycodes

Then add #include <name.h> to all of your keymap.c files. This allows you to use these new keycodes without having to redefine them in each keymap.

Once you've done that, you'll want to set the keycode definitions that you need to the <name>.h file. For instance:

#ifndef USERSPACE
#define USERSPACE

#include "quantum.h"

// Define all of
enum custom_keycodes {
  KC_MAKE = SAFE_RANGE,
  NEW_SAFE_RANGE  //use "NEW_SAFE_RANGE" for keymap specific codes
};

#endif

Now you want to create the <name>.c file, and add this content to it:

#include "<name>.h"
#include "quantum.h"
#include "action.h"
#include "version.h"

__attribute__ ((weak))
bool process_record_keymap(uint16_t keycode, keyrecord_t *record) {
  return true;
}

bool process_record_user(uint16_t keycode, keyrecord_t *record) {
  switch (keycode) {
  case KC_MAKE:
    if (!record->event.pressed) {
      SEND_STRING("make " QMK_KEYBOARD ":" QMK_KEYMAP
#if  (defined(BOOTLOADER_DFU) || defined(BOOTLOADER_LUFA_DFU) || defined(BOOTLOADER_QMK_DFU))
       ":dfu "
#elif defined(BOOTLOADER_HALFKAY)
      ":teensy "
#elif defined(BOOTLOADER_CATERINA)
       ":avrdude "
#endif
        SS_TAP(X_ENTER));
    }
    return false;
    break;
  }
  return process_record_keymap(keycode, record);
}

This will add a new KC_MAKE keycode that can be used in any of your keymaps. And this keycode will output make <keyboard>:<keymap">, making frequent compiling easier. And this will work with any keyboard and any keymap as it will output the current boards info, so that you don't have to type this out every time.

Additionally, this should flash the newly compiled firmware automatically, using the correct utility, based on the bootloader settings (or default to just generating the HEX file). However, it should be noted that this may not work on all systems. AVRDUDE doesn't work on WSL, namely (and will dump the HEX in the ".build" folder instead).

Override default userspace

By default the userspace used will be the same as the keymap name. In some situations this isn't desirable. For instance, if you use the layout feature you can't use the same name for different keymaps (e.g. ANSI and ISO). You can name your layouts mylayout-ansi and mylayout-iso and add the following line to your layout's rules.mk:

USER_NAME := mylayout