The software your keyboard should have shipped with.

ShiftWire shows your actual keymap, switches layers with the focused app, and lights supported boards from editor state.

Coming to macOS

The keymap's good. Your memory's approximate.

A layer is a place to keep keys you'll need later. It's also a place to lose them.

ShiftWire draws your actual keymap on your board's real layout and keeps the map on screen while you edit it. Edits stay in preview until you apply them. Nothing reaches the board before you say so.

Cursor comes to the front. So does its layer.

One layer for Cursor, one for the terminal, one for Figma. ShiftWire watches the focused app and activates the layer you assigned to it. You already switch apps all day. The keymap keeps up.

App switching reads the app's bundle ID. No window titles, document names, or keystrokes.

Put the signal where you want to see it.

Pick a key or cluster for a signal. When the active TypeScript file has an error, ShiftWire turns that group red. Fix it, and a green confirmation runs across the group before it goes dark.

Semantic lighting will ship with the ShiftWire extension for Cursor. It sends only the current language, diagnostic counts and severity, and whether the repo has staged changes or a merge conflict. Never source, file names, paths, repo names, diagnostic text, or keystrokes. Those signals stay on your Mac, and your keyboard learns that an error exists, not which one.

Cursor TS example.ts

export const shiftwireShouldBeText: string = 49;

Hold the layer key. See the map.

You reach for a key you defined yourself, hesitate, and try the spot next to it. On boards with live per-key control, hold the layer key instead: mapped keys light by category, and the active layer reads as a legend on the board itself.

On firmware that allows it, unused keys dim too. The map can't go stale, because it's the thing it documents.

Some boards are keymap-only. ShiftWire checks first.

ShiftWire works over USB on macOS 13 and later. Full VIA keymap support doesn't guarantee live lighting: that depends on firmware that accepts host-controlled per-key RGB, so ShiftWire lists the two as separate capabilities.

Connect a board and ShiftWire shows what it supports before anything is written to it. Nothing on this page is promised for hardware that can't do it.

Connection: USB on macOS 13+
Keymaps: Supported QMK/VIA boards
App layers: Boards with writable layer control
Semantic lighting: Requires host-controlled per-key RGB

$49. Once.

You bought the board outright. The software works the same way. Fourteen-day trial, a year of updates, no subscription. Not shipping yet, so today it costs an email address.

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