A Key to Mute the Microphone

One thing I love about my work Lenovo is its Microphone mute button. While every application offers mute functionality, having it as a special button is really handy. You can even do scripting around that. So, I wanted the same for my Framework 16.

Since Framework 16 keyboard is QMK based (albeit older version), changing key assignment was mostly figuring out which key is muting microphone. Not to keep you in the suspense - that key is F20. Each press on F20 mutes and unmutes microphone - just how standard audio mute functionality does to outputs.

So, with the knowledge of the key, the only decision left was where to assign that key too. And for that, I found = key on numpad looking the best. My whole current Numpad setup looks like this (both with and without NumLock):

┌────┬────┬────┬────┐     ┌────┬────┬────┬────┐
│Esc │PScr│MicM│Mute│     │Esc │Calc│ =  │ <- │
├────┼────┼────┼────┤     ├────┼────┼────┼────┤
│ Num│Bck-│Bck+│Vol-│     │ Num│ /  │ *  │ -  │
├────┼────┼────┼────┤     ├────┼────┼────┼────┤
│Home│ ↑  │PgUp│    │     │ 7  │ 8  │ 9  │    │
├────┼────┼────┤    │     ├────┼────┼────┤    │
│ ←  │    │ →  │Vol+│     │ 4  │ 5  │ 6  │ +  │
├────┼────┼────┼────┤     ├────┼────┼────┼────┤
│End │ ↓  │PdDn│    │     │ 1  │ 2  │ 3  │    │
├────┴────┼────┤    │     ├────┴────┼────┤    │
│ Insert  │Del │Entr│     │ 0       │ .  │Entr│
└─────────┴────┴────┘     └─────────┴────┴────┘

Thus, that changed my definition of keyboard to:

[_FN] = LAYOUT(
    KC_ESC,  S(KC_PRINT_SCREEN), KC_F20,  KC_MUTE,
    KC_NUM,  KC_BRID, KC_BRIU, KC_VOLD,
    KC_P7,   KC_P8,   KC_P9,
    KC_P4,   KC_P5,   KC_P6,   KC_VOLU,
    KC_P1,   KC_P2,   KC_P3,
    KC_INS,  KC_DEL,  KC_ENT
),

Short recompile later and my numpad now has that extra key for much easier muting. As always, QMK code is freely available.