Hopefully, you found the default rainbow lighting of your ZSA keyboard suitably spectacular when you first plugged it in, but that might not be the best longterm lighting choice for your style. Fortunately, you can completely change the lighting or turn it off entirely. Here's Mike with a handy video overview of all the lighting controls:
Lighting basics
There are two lighting modes available for ZSA keyboards: manual mode and custom per-key/per-layer mode.
Manual LED control contains animations and allows you to tweak your entire board's lighting in the moment, by pressing keys on your keyboard. There are keys to change the current hue and brightness, and flip between all the various animations.
Per-key/per-layer LED control allows you to set colors for certain keys and layers in Oryx ahead of time. You can use this to highlight just the media control keys on layer 2, for example. So every time you flip to layer 2, your media control keys can glow blue, while your mouse control keys can glow green.
Each of these modes has its own toggle, and they have a hierarchy:
Toggle lighting allows you to turn off the manual lighting. Any custom lighting options you've defined, such as layer colors, will still work even with the manual lighting turned off.
Toggle layer colors allows you to turn off the per-key/per-layer lighting.
With both manual and per-key lighting on, when you switch to a layer that has per-key lighting defined, only the per-key lighting will be visible. The per-key lighting mode affects the entire layer even if not every key has a custom color defined.
In other words, let's say you don't have any predefined per-key colors for layer 0, but you do have some colors set on layer 1. You can have a cool animation running on layer 0, and then when you switch to layer 1, the animation will stop and only the keys you want highlighted on that layer will be lit up.
If you still want to see the animation even in layer 1, simply hit Toggle layer colors and the per-key lighting mode will be turned off across all of your layers.
Indicator LEDs
Our boards also come with some small LEDs that indicate the status of the board. The most common use for these LEDs is to show the layer has changed, but these LEDs will also change to indicate that the board is in a flashable state, if you're recording a dynamic macro, and, if you turn on the "Enable caps lock status" setting in Oryx's misc settings, these LEDs can even show you when Caps Lock is on.
If you don't like these little LEDs, you can turn them off with either the Indicator brightness key (this cycles through a few brightness levels) or the Indicator toggle key (this just turns the small LEDs off). Depending on your board, you'll have access to one or the other as different boards allow for different levels of power management to these LEDs.
Animations
There are many different animations available to choose from. Feel free to explore by cycling through them with the Switch animation key, and when you've narrowed it down to your favorites, you can turn off any of the animations that you won't use.
If you like an animation but want it to be slower (or faster!), you can add the Animation speed - and Animation speed + keys to your layout. Adjusting the speed can make the wave animations, for example, nice and calming or a real dance party.
If you go a little far and just need an animation to stop, the Stop animation key is there to help.
Do you have any other questions about lighting? Email us at [email protected] and we'll be happy to help.
