GMMK Pro + QMK Advanced Lighting with Via

[swy]

Hi there.

TL; DR:

Is there an Advanced Lighting feature for the GMMK Pro in QMK? Custom lighting per-key or custom lighting depending on which layer(s) are active?

## Backstory to my question
I purchased my GMMK Pro back in 2021 and am now just finally getting around to customizing it, now that I know what it is capable of. I recently hurt my wrist and was looking at alternative ergonomic keyboards that I could use with my wrist at an angle. One of these keyboards was the UHK 2.

## “mouse key” and active layer
The UHK has a dedicated “mouse” key, where the the typical capslock key would be. Holding down the mouse key allows you to use IJKL to take over and move the mouse cursor (similar to WASD in video games), and use left shift as left/right shift as left/right click respectively. This seemed huge for me as it would mean a lot less hand movement for small mouse movements where normal tabbing across the interface wouldn’t be sufficient.

As far as I can tell, these mouse movements aren’t available in Glorious Core 2 (though clicks and mouse wheel, etc, are) . However, these are available in QMK. I won’t go into the trials and tribulations of flashing QMK, including accidentally bricking the whole thing, but that’s a story for another time. I flashed QMK onto my board using the QMK CLI with a VIA_ENABLE = yes and I can now see it in Via. I can customize my keys and everything successfully now, however…

## the real question: advanced lighting with via
The last piece of the puzzle for me is state management. I have my layer 0 which acts as a typical keyboard, as well as layer 1 which acts as my Mouse layer (my custom keymap settings down below). This works great, but I miss having a visual representation of the current state I am in, or what layers are active.

I saw this post on Reddit of another user who was able to do this:

The OP even posted his C code to Github, however I am unfamiliar with C and not sure where to start / don’t want to mess my board up in the process of learning.

I noticed when researching on youtube that other QMK-enabled keyboards, like the keychron 8, has an “advanced” lighting tab where all of these variations are possible:
.

My biggest question: is this feature available with the GMMK Pro? Am I using the wrong keymap.json that has all of this configured? I don’t see anyway to do this in my current setup:

Follow Up Edits:

Edit 1: Could I write a macro to potentially do this? instead of just TG(1) could I do RGBg && TG(1) or something? This would toggle the RGB off and then Toggle Layer 1 on. This isn’t pretty but would give me what I am looking for I think.

Edit 2: This doesn’t look possible Getting a “Whoops! Invalid keycodes detected inside {}: RGB_TOG”

My layer 1 set up.

• left shift : left click
• i : move mouse cursor up
• j : move mouse cursor left
• k : move mouse cursor down
• l : move mouse cursor down
• right shift : right click
• del : set cursor speed to 0
• pg up: scroll wheel up
• pg dn: scroll wheel down
• end : set cursor speed to 1
• esc : toggle layer 1 off (back to layer 0)

[swy]

My images seem to be broken for some reason. Here they are again re-uploaded:

Advanced lighting on other keyboards

My current QMK VIA set up

Attempting to use a macro to chain commands together

[swy]

I wasn’t able to figure out the lighting tab in Via, so I ended up trying to see if I could learn C and it actually wasn’t too bad.

The first step was understanding how flashing keymaps worked. In the official QMK firmware repo, there is a keyboards/gmmk/pro/rev1/ansi directory. When creating your binary, you define which profile to build, with the -km (for keymaps) parameter, like qmk compile -kb gmmk/pro/rev1/ansi -km default.

Inside this default/ profile, there is a keymap.c file. By default it is pretty basic. It defines the keymap for layer 0 and layer 1, as well as sets up the rotary encoder.

We can extend the functionality of the board, in this scenario, the lighting, whenever a different layer is toggled. At the bottom of my keymap.c file I added the following:

bool rgb_matrix_indicators_advanced_user(uint8_t led_min, uint8_t led_max) {
    for (uint8_t i = led_min; i < led_max; i++) {
        switch(get_highest_layer(layer_state|default_layer_state)) {
            case 2:
                rgb_matrix_set_color(i, RGB_BLUE);
                break;
            case 1:
                rgb_matrix_set_color(i, RGB_ORANGE);
                break;
            default:
                break;
        }
    }
    return false;
}

After adding this in and re-compiling the firmware, then reflashing the board, when i hit my function key, my entire keyboard illuminates orange to show that I am in layer 1. When holding right control, my keyboard also illuminates orange, and when i let go, it goes back to normal.

This is nowhere near advanced as what some other people have done, but I still feel like I’ve just unlocked a super power. I probably could have figured this out from RTFM, but there was just so much to take in and understand, it felt unsurmountable. I hope this post of me going back and forth talking to myself helps someone else down the road.