Death to caps lock!

Dwight reports on the mostly laudable effort to ban the CAPS LOCK key. I say “mostly” because as some of Dwight’s commenters point out there are still some legitimate uses for the accursed thing. As the need to educate people about why typing in ALL CAPS is rude seems to have been effective in reducing the number of people who continue to do that, I’m not as passionate about this as I might have been a few years ago.

I actually think a better idea might be to relocate the CAPS LOCK key. I use the thing purposefully maybe a couple of times a year, but hit it by accident way more often than that, usually when I’m groping for the Shift key. I’d love to have a keyboard that had CAPS LOCK someplace where I’d never hit it by mistake, like maybe over where the Pause/Break key is now. (Does anyone even know what that key is used for nowadays? I can’t ever recall hitting it.) Make the Shift key bigger to fill the void left by CAPS LOCK, and I’d be happy.

What do you think? Keep CAPS LOCK where it is, kill it, or move it someplace else? Leave a comment and let me know.

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2 Responses to Death to caps lock!

  1. kevin whited says:

    Instead of wishing for a hardware redesign that involves lots of keyboard manufacturers, why not just remap the keyboard via software?

    That’s what Ed Bott suggests.

  2. Mathwiz says:

    What bugs me isn’t the very existence of Caps Lock; it’s the goofball way it works with the sHIFT key! A shifted letter should always be a capital letter, and it should release Caps Lock. That’s how typewriters worked, but every PC for the last quarter century has gotten it wrong.

    IBM made that boneheaded decision way back in ’81 when they wrote the BIOS for the IBM PC. There are programs that make Caps Lock work correctly, but to this day every PC BIOS and every version of Windows works the “IBM way” for “compatibility.” As if there were legions of keyboarders who have come to rely on Caps Lock working the way IBM mis-designed it!

    But if we have to ban a key, I’d much rather lose Caps Lock than the key Microsoft took away from us: Print Screen.

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