Raw QMK keycodes (not symbolic)

Getting output from printf debugging for QMK is not worth much if it is not known what the QMK key codes actually are. That is, actual numbers, not the symbolic names in the source code.

Some QMK keycodes (raw numbers)

Most of the information here is copied from the QMK page Keycodes Overview (/docs/keycodes.md). I added the raw QMK keycodes (the third column). The first column is the row number in the table (more or less arbitrary); it is for easier reference and a way to see the number of key codes. Note that the raw QMK keycodes seem to be consecutive, but they are not (there are breaks near #3 and #164 (modifier keys)).

The raw codes were observed on a Keychron V5 (ARM-based) and QMK version approximately May 2023, using printf debugging to dump out the raw QMK keycodes.

Note: Some annotation in the table, for example, “= and +”, assumes a United States keyboard layout. It does not match, for example, European keyboard layouts.

Note: It isn’t the case in general in QMK, but all the QMK keycodes shown here are below 256 and from raw code 4 (KC_A) on, they are thus equal to the USB HID usage IDs for a keyboard.

The most common QMK keycodes

Mouse QMK keycodes

The process of getting the numbers

I used these steps:

From the official page of QMK keycodes, I copy pasted the main QMK key codes directly from the web page, from the first table, “Basic Keycodes”. It was 201 rows. The columns were tab-separated.

Pasted it into a spreadsheet. This was for later inserting the result, the raw keycodes and for highlighting particular key codes of interest found during debugging in colour. It could be used to export a tab-separated list for some automatic processing.

Copy-pasted the symbolic column (identifier in C code) into a text document and let a small Perl one-liner generate code for insertion in the QMK code.

This was wrapped in XXX and to be dumped out using a helper function:

XXXX

The code was compiled, the QMK keyboard flashed and the dump activated by a particular macro key (note that it could be anywhere, even in init_XXuser(); the point is to output it only once)

The output was captured to a text file and the list of 201 number were pasted in the spreadsheet.

For manual evaluation of the printf debugging, this was sufficient. The actual key codes present were highlighted in the spreadsheet (to easier navigate the long list of keycodes):

Note that keycodes on that official QMK page are mostly ordered by the raw number value, not entirely. Keycodes 3 and 4 are missing and the 10 key codes for modifier keys are inserted out of order after keycode XXX.