Slashdot Mirror
Is Caps Lock Dead?
An anonymous reader asks "Recently I have noticed that I haven't used caps lock other for any purpose other than hitting it by accident. Once upon a time, COBOL was written in all caps, and other languages like BASIC and Fortran were not case sensitive. Capitals were the way to go for writing code. Does the caps lock key serve any purpose any more, and if not, should it be removed, moved, or replaced?"
how else are you supposed to shout?
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
else it would be *very* discriminating against all those AOL'ers.
C|N>K
oF COURSE cAPSlOCK IS STILL USEFUL! iMAGINE ALL THE USERS OF THE WORLD NOT ABLE TO SEND LONG SHOUTING EMAILS IF cAPSlOCK WAS REMOVED! wHAT WOULD THEY DO THEN?! sTaRt UsInG aLt-ShIfT? tHE HORROR!
Call on God, but row AWAY from the rocks!
Keep it as a tribute to the coders of old. It's like having a museum in your keyboard. You can even play with the exibit.
I find a drop of superglue under the key ensures its continued usefulness.
If caps lock were gone, how would morons get their misdirected points across?
IT'S SPELLED MORANS, YOU DUMMY.
And do you give your constants names so long that you really need to use your caps lock key instead of just using shift?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Are you trying to say that you hit the caps key twice for every capital letter you need to type that's not in a big row of them? You really hit the caps key at the start of every sentence?
Yeesh, mate. Shift. SHIFT.
MY BAD, I ADMIT I WAS OUT FOR A BIT LAST NIGHT, and I'm not in top form i indeed got mixed up with the SHIFT KEY.
I appologize to Slashdot and to the "Shift Key" for any Confusion on my part.... again my bad.
in a pinch caps lock might work as a "ANY" key???
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
In fact, I'm developing an application right now that requires Caps Lock.
Press CAPS LOCK to proceed.
Press SCROLL LOCK to cancel.
Please don't take my CAPS away from me!
The Amiga had a Help key. I believe it was where the PC's Escape key is. Or it could be on the other side not sure, been a while. The thing that always amused me was the fact that for most programs, even Workbench, the help key did nothing. Not a thing.
They might as well have renamed it the 'RTFM' key.
All I know is that everytime I play Diablo 2 or another game, the Windows Key become the absolute BANE OF MY EXISTENCE! X(
Join the TWIT army now!
Dear Slashdot,
Very recently, to my unimaginable surprise, I have noticed that I haven't used the tilde key for any purpose other than hitting it by accident. I know that once upon a time people were using the tilde key. They were using it like there was no tomorrow. I don't use it now, though, which makes me very sad. Does the tilde key serve any purpose any more? Does it still serve any purpose whatsoever? If not, will it ever serve a purpose? Will it ever make any sense? If not, should it be removed, moved, or replaced? If so, will we be able to see it in museum? What if later I find some use for this key, but it will have been gone long ago? What then? What will be the future of this little key? What, I ask?
Thank you very much, Slashdot, for your answer!
Sincerely,
Concerned reader.
P.S. I love reading Slashdot and especially the Ask Slashdot section, when people always ask so interesting questions! THANK YOU VERY MUCH! (Oh, God damn it! I used caps lock!)
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
There are all sorts of programming situations where having a caps lock key helps keep things readable. For example...
SELECT *
FROM tblWhatever a
INNER JOIN tblYaddaYadda b
ON a.ID = b.ID
WHERE b.foo = 1
Not to mention data entry work... lots of places that do data entry use all caps.
Oh, and did I mention that THIS IS A STUPID ARTICLE? SURELY THERE MUST BE SOMETHING EXCITING ENOUGH GOING ON IN THE WORLD THAT WE DON'T NEED TO PUT THIS CRAP ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE SITE?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
My little brother used to sneak on my computer all the time before he got a decent laptop, and I'd always be annoyed to find the caps lock key on from whatever flaming/shouting/n00bing he was doing there. So one day I remapped caps lock to switch to a Cyrillic keyboard--it helps a lot with my Russian homework, and I never did find it enabled again after my brother had been using my computer.
YELLING!!!
I have a cousin who comes over to my house for holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc...), and he used to run a web page. I was showing him some stuff, and he went to go update the page. I noticed he was typing pretty slowly, especially around capitals, and then I looked down at the keyboard...
He was using Caps Lock twice for each capital letter!
Like instead of [SHIFT]H[/SHIFT]ello, world! he would do [CAPS LOCK/]H[CAPS LOCK/]ello, world!...
It was truly painful to watch. So, I told him, you shouldn't use the Caps Lock key like that, because that's what Shift is for! At the time, he got annoyed at me and said something like, I've already learned it this way, it's quicker for me...
Lo and behold, the next time he runs into me, he says thanks, I can type much faster now... it's now become a sort of joke between the two of us...
I can't figure out where he would learn that from, though... any ideas?
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Um, what's a capslock?