About — why daken exists

Who runs this site

hal40n, a software engineer based in Japan. Everything on daken — planning, design, development, and operations — is done by one person.

Why I built daken

In the spring of 2026 I bought my first split keyboard and wrote a keymap of my own, with layers and home-row mods. Then I started typing — and my fingers simply could not keep up. Every symbol meant pausing to remember which layer it lived on. To use the board for real work, I needed deliberate practice until the keymap became muscle memory.

But there was nowhere to practice. Mainstream typing sites assume a standard layout and cannot load a custom keymap. None of them drill the moves that actually matter on a custom board, like “hit the symbol on layer 2”. The few keymap-aware trainers out there are tied to specific commercial keyboards and don't work with DIY builds.

So I built it myself. daken loads your ZMK .keymap or QMK keymap.jsonas-is and lets you drill on your own layout — especially the “I know it in my head but my fingers won't move” operations like layer switching and home-row mods. I practice on it every day and keep fixing whatever gets in my way.

How this site is run

• Browser-only: your keymap stays in your browser's LocalStorage and is never sent to a server
• Free to use: a way of giving back to the DIY keyboard community
• Dogfooded daily: the operator is the site's heaviest user, and that is the quality bar

Feature requests and bug reports are welcome via the contact page.