Software Customization and Lighting

I was not sure if I should even do this section for reasons discussed in the disassembly page. After all, if the currently used USB microcontroller is so scarce that the company is going to replace it with one that does not have QMK support by default, how will it meet the promises from months ago, let alone deliver the other one of VIA support? As it stands, my unit and others shipping now will have native QMK support, and both the company as well as individuals are still working on (at the time of this article) some GUI tools for those who want to fully customize the keyboard functionality, encoder wheel, and lighting with the LEDs onboard. The first-party software support, however, should remain regardless. So here we are taking a look at the all-new Glorious Core. The installer is part of an archived folder found on the product page. Installation is simple enough and asks for 443 MB of storage space while actually taking exactly what it asks for too! It is a lightweight program as well, which will please users no doubt.


With the keyboard connected, Glorious Core immediately recognized it and also saw that the unit was on an older firmware. This is quite common with keyboards shipping while still in a pre-launch state, and the company has a good deal of firmware updates on the way, no doubt. Updating was smooth and took under a minute from start to finish without needing me to physically disconnect and re-connect the keyboard.


I was not sure what to expect going in, especially since my experience with the older Glorious Keyboard Editor v2.0 during testing of the original GMMK was quite terrible. That particular program was a re-skin of a basic OEM software suite, which scaled poorly and had UI issues out the door. I am glad then that the Glorious Core is a massive improvement comparatively. It is clearly quite new too, supporting only the GMMK PRO and not the original GMMK. Even when it comes to mice, the new-ish Model O Wireless seems to be the only one supported at this time. The user experience is better, but still not great. UI tweaks are needed, including cue tips that do the job properly, moving menu items centrally, and the sub-menus underneath, highlighting the changes made on the virtual keyboard for remapping, a revamped macro editor with better editing tools, and so on. Time will tell where the Glorious Core ends up, but it might be more crucial to get it featured fully sooner rather than later given the ticking time bomb with QMK support and the MCU shortage coming up with the GMMK PRO PCB.

Seen above is a walkthrough of customizing the GMMK PRO in Glorious Core. There are three menus, with the Lighting menu opening up a plethora of preset lighting effects to choose from on the right, including static, dynamic, and reactive effects. There are options associated with each, including brightness and speed as appropriate, but also the choice of RGB color, or a specific one that can be chosen from a color palette, and manually choosing the specific R/G/B brightness level from a range of 0-255 (256 steps for each color leading to a total of 16.8 M colors per LED). There is no way to configure side lighting separately at this time until you click on the per-key sub-menu where you can select them even if the virtual keyboard does not show them. There are also three layers to choose from for each customization setting, which works well for the second menu that is all about key binding. Here too do we get several preset options, including a single key or keystroke, media playback, and volume control, mouse strokes, a macro recorder, and OS shortcuts. The third tab is hilarious since it just hosts the option to choose the polling rate at this time, making it a prime example of the UI tweaks left to be made.


Here is a look at the keyboard combination as assembled on the previous page, lit up in a rainbow wave lighting effect. Given the switches don't let much light through and the barely-floating keycaps are opaque as well, there is not a lot to see if you fancy a light show. The gaps between the keycaps are where most of the action takes place on the top. Side lighting is brighter thus, so you end up with two sources of accent lighting rather than functional backlighting.