Razer Tartarus V2 is a left hand keyboard that is very useful and complex, perfect for people that need to use hotkey-heavy use programs, hotkeys or macro in a single key press and a more comfortable grid layout for gaming - if Synapse always functioned properly anyway. I always wondered why this product hasn't soared through the gaming sphere or artists in general, people who usually need to hotkey mod things to make workflow and game play much easier than having to guess where the keys on the keyboard are in a dark room. It's also strange how little support or fixes there are in part of the community, unlike how I have seen many others do with other electronics, games, etc. After so many years of using this product, it ceased to surprise me how much worse this product's software Synapse deteriorates over time. While that is just the unfortunate reality of electronics, the developers never seem to have addressed the more glaring issues which make this product not worth your money and headache time on troubleshooting. So many things can break Synapse, so many in the community have complained about it, and it seems the company just doesn't care in fixing them. In recent posts I have found regarding this, it seems like they have been trying to solve whatever issues people have brought up but hardly ever seen a solution from them directly, usually saying they are willing to DM rather than tackle the issue publicly (or as usually seen for tech issues online).
Some of Synapse's issues have been mentioned before in a previous post, that will be linked with associated posts down below. In it I mentioned not just common issues that arise from regular use but also with detecting Clip Studio as I have needed to use it more frequently for different projects in recent months. For a while, I was fine with just tabbing in, out and waiting the 5 seconds it took to load the CSP keymap and it stayed that way for a few years. In more recent weeks unfortunately, the issues became more frequent: maps erasing and needing to pause to re-import it (if I had remembered to save recent changes), crashing more frequently so I was having to wait for my CSP map to reload again, and even opening the Synapse program to do changes would cause any of the two previous issues or outright lag for minutes on end.
The Saving Grace: ReWASD
So I went to look for a better alternative. If it worked without erasing anything and not delaying between keymap swapping would be best, anything else pro was a plus. I kept bumping into RGB modifier questions on reddit until someone in those comments had mentioned about a software I have seen around Synapse issues. The only downside to it is after the week trial, you had to pay.... so after painfully paying the full program because my trial expired from a previous failed attempt, ReWASD pretty much works the same but it also works with any device with buttons. It took a while to figure out setting up the Tartarus' joystick, which I use the most to change to different parts of the keyboard and access hotkeys, but was finally able to get it down before genuinely setting up a default layout, linking apps and customizing for each program. It also isn't eating heavily into my RAM and immediately changing maps as soon as I click on the linked program, unlike Synapse's persistent 5 second delay. It was already so much more improved, but also has a helpful export layout of shortcut/hotkeys/macro you have set - as shown in the image below, the left most column is for the device's factory setting and the rest of the columns are the substitute keys, as for my Mabi keymap you can see what layer has what part of the keyboard/minor macro and with the joystick's factory settings being the arrow keys assigned it to each layer. It works with CSP too without erasing or delaying anything!
I have done this modifying just this past weekend, so I still need to see if there are any more downsides or consistent bugs from constant use of ReWASD. The only minor downside about it is that it's not capable of syncing colors for Razer products, so I might need to download a different program just for that. I will update on this post with any new findings. For now, I can finally illustrate without having to troubleshoot faulty software half the time.