Kanata integration - userLayouts

[eb0687]

I just installed overkeys becuase of the Kanata integration, i figured it out be super useful to have an overlay on demand if i forget a keybind or what exactly is in a layer.

Going through the setup documentation, I realized that setting up the userLayouts in the overkeys config must be done manually?

I have about 6 layers in my Kanata config, and this seems like it would be a tedious process to not only convert the kanata config to the overkeys userLayout, but keeping them in sync whenever a change is made to the Kanata keymaps adds to the overhead.

Am I missing something here, or is there an automated way of converting this?

[conventoangelo]

There’s no automatic importer for Kanata configs yet.

My thinking so far: keeping userLayouts in sync with Kanata can be tedious, but adding full import support would noticeably increase the project’s complexity. Kanata supports many different configuration styles, aliases and shortcuts. I, for one, have defaliases that wouldn't look good in an OverKeys layout yet they are named that way to look better in a kanata.kbd file. OverKeys really only needs a layer’s keys and layer names, whereas a faithful Kanata importer would need to understand and translate many more cases (per-device remaps, multi-layer aliases, custom shortcuts, etc.). That scope feels like a substantial feature to design and maintain and right now, personally, I see it more freeing and more customizable to separate these two files.

I’ll leave this open as an enhancement. It could be useful, but it needs a careful design to handle Kanata’s complexity. In the meantime, a practical workaround is to give an AI chat the sample_config.json (or the OverKeys docs) plus your kanata.kbd file and ask it to generate the corresponding userLayouts, or create a small one-off script to extract layer names and key mappings. If you’re interested in a more robust solution, contributions or a proposal for the importer’s design would be welcome.