Hey there.
This is not really related to Colemak, but to keymap systems.
But there is a lot of tinkerers here who could be interested.
I'm too a keyboard DIYer. I've spent years tinkering with XKB.
XKB works for simple things, but for more complicated ones, it is old, buggy, full of crufts.
I'm myself using a lot of tricks for my keyboards. I'm fed up with them.
I've wasted countless hours debugging this horrible piece of software.
And for anything complex, XKB is just horrible.
e.g. yesterday, I was trying to put an Altgr layer on the level2 of left alt, and somehow it interacted with my NumLock level, making it unusable..
I've encountered many many of such weird bugs.
Moving forward, I have quite specific needs when it comes to keymaps, and QMK allows for way more customization that are simply impossible or horribly complex with XKB (e.g. Tap Modifiers).
I will not continue to argue how QMK is way superior to XKB. It is pretty obvious to me.
But if you don't agree, I open to discuss that point in more depth.
So my first question is: is it possible to totally ditch XKB and use QMK instead?
That is, inside X or Wayland, totally remove XKB and use QMK?
I know QMK is a microcontroller for hardware keyboards, so this seems complicated.
But it is is so much more convenient to use its capabilities for specifying keymaps than XKB.
I'm not knowledgeable in X or Wayland (beyond XKB).
For X, I doubt it's possible to ditch XKB.
But Wayland is sold as being more modular.
So, second question: would it be possible to make Wayland use QMK in lieu of XKB? Wouldn't that be awesome if we could write a keymap in QMK's way not for a programmable hardware, but for a software keymap.