I got tired of maintaining my own fork of the QMK firmware repository. So many files that aren't mine -- it was very distracting.
Plus more and more I was building firmware for rare boards that did not have their firmware committed to the main QMK repo. What to do?
The code in this repo contains my userspace and the custom keymaps I need to get the most out of the boards I have. It also contains scripts to set the QMK environment up that I need.
For local dev, it assumes you have direnv, git, rsync, qmk (The QMK
CLI), and probably more.
It's worth noting that QMK recommends not using the latest AVR GCC (avr-gcc)
package. In its own setup scripts (referenced from util/qmk_install.sh at the
time of this writing), it explicitly installs an old version before attempting
to connect to a package repo to install the latest.
The install scripts are good reference points to help you install the right versions locally.
Run make to set everything up. Running it multiple times should do the bare
minimum to get you to a working environment. Check out the Makefile if you are
curious what it does.
Then you may run qmk compile and qmk flash commands like normal. For example:
qmk flash -kb ut472 -km patcoll
If you need to use firmware from a repo that is not the main repo, set it up as
a target that checks out its files into working_area in the Makefile and make
the keymaps target depend on it.
I've found that most/all QMK forks with custom firmware can have their custom firmware files copied into the latest version of the main QMK repo and compiled without any issues. This way you always have the latest QMK bugfixes and improvements and the custom firmware you need. Best of both worlds.
There are examples in the Makefile to use -- copy/paste and customize.
When editing files in the userspace, it can be useful to test your changes across all custom keymaps.
Run the make test command to test building all the keymaps.