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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?"
especially useful in VIM.
Naming convention in C++: Constants in ALL CAPS
To blog is sublime
Well, as I am using a mixture of Debian/Sid/Experimental and lots of unstable (and non-official) packages, my system freezes once in a while. However, pressing Caps Lock helps me check if the keyboard driver is still live (so that I can use the MagicSysRq Keys) or I must reboot by hand. Could use NumLock for that matter, but CapsLock is usually nearest to one of my hands. The truly useless key is ScrollLock, BTW...
Or actually, just that it should not be another enter key... sorry
Actually, in the US Navy and other branches of the service radio messages all always in all caps. These were a pretty routine part of life on ship (for Officers / admin personnel etc) We would compose the messages on a PC w/ word processor, print hard copy, then have approved by CoC. Radio men would send them out encrpyed, hard copies were always kept for paper trail. A ship my send dozens or even hundreds of these a week, so the're quite common. There are a few who may need cap locks who aren't programmers. M
Here's how I made capslock an extra control in Windows 2000/XP.
Go to this path in the registry editor:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Keyboard Layout
In that registry path, add a new binary value, like so:
Name: Scancode Map
Type: REG_BINARY
Data:
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
02 00 00 00 1D 00 3A 00
00 00 00 00
This required a reboot to take effect (for me, anyway).
I'm not a touch typist, and I often just use my right hand to type, leaving the other hand free for holding books, documentation, operating equipment, etc. Caps lock is useful when I have to type in hexadecimal constants, or source code that is all in upper-case (FORTRAN, Assembler).
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I use caps lock all the time at work.
I make lots of calculation sheets in excel - text in caps is consistent, easy to read at small print when you shrink big sheets down to size.
Also, in CAD caps is used pretty much exclusively. Once again, consistently and readability at small sizes.
I think I need a new sig here.
uControl is a nice little Mac OS X hack that disables/remaps Caps Lock and other modifier keys on PowerBooks.
I also used it to remap the "Enter" key to the right of the spacebar on my 15" TiBook to "Command" -- I have no clue why Apple thought that was a good idea, but uControl saved the day.
It's very well designed -- if it thinks there's going to be a conflict when booting into an upgraded OS it will disable itself (vs. barfing and causing a system panic...)
Use the Happy Hacking keyboard. It has no Caps Lock. Its Control key is in the right place.
Most if not all text in an engineering drawing are in CAPS.
But Num Lock and and Scroll Lock make Caps Lock redundant if that's all you ever use it for.
sig
I use it often when working on hardware, to pause the boot process so I can read where my IRQs are going, what controller my drive is on, etc.
chris@xanadu:~$ whatis /.
/.: nothing appropriate.
It's much easier to download this:. aspx?Fa milyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&Displa yLang=en
:)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details
Then that has a nice little thingy called remap.exe. Let's you remap any key to any other.
Every single day of work, I enter data into an Oracle database window. My company has standardized on ALL CAPS for its data entry, so everything in the database is in caps. It's very eighties; look for it at a corporation near you.
So yes, I still need the button, but I'd give my left pinky to be rid of it.
Apple has done this already.
It's right above the delete key in place of the infrequently used insert key.
Unlike the PC makers' latest trend of adding a bajillion buttons to the keyboards that will never be used, apple added four buttons above the numlock pad in place of the "lock" lights (which in place are located directly on their respective keys). The four (incredibly useful!) buttons are:
Volume Down
Volume Up
Mute
Eject Disc (less useful than other 3, especially if you have more than one optical drive. Still, since Mac OS requires a software dismount, it's necessary.
Oh yeah... did I mention that it has a USB hub in it? Why the hell are we still shipping PCs with 12-year-old PS/2 technology?
I just miss the power button. Even so, apple's relocated it to the monitor (another thing PC makers should have done years ago), which in my mind is the 'proper' place for the system's power button.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' from the shell. gUip in vim to uppercase the current paragraph. Any decent text editor will have a similar feature.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
For those too timid to enter binary codes into the windows registry, there's a program out there called KeyTweak for you. Thats for win2k/xp, nearly everyone else can head here.
I'm a navy reservist, and although the Navy and the other branches of the armed forces are moving towards computerization of almost every aspect of information management, oft times you'll find that because of some arcane requirement for filling out a form or other type of data entry, you're required to use all caps. However, in many cases, the program that was written to replace forms with this requirement won't enforce the capitalization, much less actually automatically capitalize everything. You say it's dumb, I say it's dumb, and all the staff we have say it's dumb. But, in the mean time, they have to live with it, and having the caps lock key makes it all the more bearable.
No way... I use the insert key daily...
mark text
Ctrl+Ins = Copy
Shift+ins = Paste.
Works in most programs on both windows and linux...
---
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
Here's the official way of remapping keys in Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server:
1) Download the Resource Kit Tools.
2) Run Remapkey.exe to Remap the Windows Keyboard Layout anyway you want.
For some very strange reason, this sometimes does not work reliably in a DOS window when using a PS/2 to USB converter for the keyboard. Since the remapping is done at a fundamental level, the failure is difficult to understand.
All typewriters have CAPS LOCK. Thus,CAPS LOCK was not invented for programming, just for typing. Besides, less than 1% of computer users are programmers. This is a tiny minority which is irrelevant. The question is if the majority of computer users want to have it removed. I think the answer is no: Typewriters had CAPS LOCK for over a hundred years, why should it be removed from computers?
Because some of us use it on a regular basis.
My Belkin KVM switch uses syslog to change systems. Linux uses it to pause fast moving console output. BSD uses it to view the console history.
Fixed link
Download is for "Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit"
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
"CTRL-Break" was rather useful when programming in BASIC if you were like me as a kid and regularly made infinite loops by mistake. =)
Member of Orkut? Annoyed with spam?
Some operating systems actually are able to make use of scroll lock! For instance, in FreeBSD you can press scroll lock, and then can scroll up and down (and pgup pgdn) at the console--going back all the way to when it started to boot.
I miss that when I use linux..makes the console feel much less efficient
i work in architecture, specifically drafting plans. every single portion of text is capitalized. if not for caps lock, then this would prove quite difficult to do.
Theres on here.
I disabled mine long ago and haven't looked back.
Especially in financial businesses (Banks etc) .. Printing out checks and certain forms will always be done in CAPS so as to not confuse the other parties. I find it a bit silly because one person hasn't used it, it must mean that no one else does. Sure, home users might not find much use out of it, but in the business world it is used everyday. And the business world makes up the majority of PC sales in the world.
Actually, I think it's because ALL CAPS is more readable when low quality copies are made: blueprints/bluelines, faxes or microfilms.
The smaller features of lower case get muddy faster.
I use ALL CAPS daily, and wasn't proud of it, until now!
"old school" type documents like chits (such as a leave chit) and most official documents.
Basically all databases i've ever worked with use all caps as well.
All your base are belong to Google.
no, it's a low level windows fault, when the keyboard drivers are no longer functioning it is windows which has crashed
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
"Now, I'm not saying that it's NEVER used by ANYONE, because I'm sure someone will reply and tell me that it does some obscure function in some obscure program."
Only if you consider *nix an obscure program. Scroll lock in those (at least those that I've tried it in, which means a couple different flavors of Linux and FreeBSD) stops the screen from scrolling so you can read it. FreeBSD will even let you scroll up with the arrow keys so you can see text that has scrolled off the screen. It's actually quite useful. (For instance, you're maknig something with dependencies and a message comes up that you should actually read but it starts to compile the next thing, you can still read it. Also removes a lot of the benefit of piping stuff to more or less.) I would imagine there's a way to set this up under Linux too, but I haven't yet seen a distribution that has it working out of the box and I don't know how to configure it.
In any sane shell, 'cd' without any arguments is equivalent to 'cd ~'.
Microsoft excel. With no scroll lock, it moves the current selection cursor. With scroll lock, it moves the whole sheet (as if u used the scrollbar) and doesn't move the selection.
^_^
Same thing for Windows (2k at least)
It's roots date back to 1984 when COBOL source code was always written in caps, and to change it would require rewriting almost 2,000 object files.
So the need for a caps lock is still very much alive...
I use it every day - it's a common shortcut key for KVM switches (Belkin, at least). Scroll Lock - Scroll Lock - Machine #.
That's still somewhat a testament to it's uselessness though. I'm fairly sure the KVM makers thought to themselves "we need a shortcut key on the keyboard... one that is almost never used for anything else..."
The capslock key is used by some non-English input methods to switch back and forth between English entry and the other language. I found out about this when I kept noticing that my fiancee left the caps lock key on for me when I would use her laptop. In Traditional Chinese entry mode the caps lock being on puts you back into English entry mode. So I very much doubt, since the Chinese make um what 99.99% of all keyboards, that they will be removing the capslock key. :-)
Scroll lock works in the Linux console, but there's a better thing for stopping scrolling - Ctrl-S/Ctrl-Q, which works in any normal terminal. Shift-PageUp/Shift-PageDown move up and down through the buffer.
Not really. Once you master C-a, C-e, C-v, M-v, etc, THEN you'll never use a mouse again. Home and its friends are just too far away from the home row to be really useful. Thank God for emacs keybindings :)
My other car is first.
In short, there is no possible way on any but the fastest of current machines for a USB mouse to approximate the responsivity of a PS/2 port mouse being sampled at 200Hz (the maximum rate the port will tolerate).
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
The first one will save you lots of money in mailing. If your company is in to saving money, then your mailing lists already do that. Compressability of data is *very* important for large-scale systems, and can have significant improvements with an ALL CAPS DATABASE. The last two just help reduce system load and operator error; both are good things to reduce.
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Hey, you try to find an open nick these days!
Keyboards still have a Cap Locks Key? I bought a keyboard without one years ago. Never gonna go back.
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/pfuca-store/
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
Counter theory: The only mechanical typewriter i've ever played with (was a kid at that time, so played is the right term) also had caps-lock right above shift. (Not to mention that shift lifted a big and heavy part of that typewriter around half a centimeter, so caps lock saved your pinky if you had to write more than one or two letters caps.)
Free as in mason.
This puts you in the minority. I have worked with readability (mostly related to layout, contrast and fonts), and to the overwhelming majority of us all caps text is significantly more difficult to read than mixed or even lower case text.
And if your compression algorithm compresses all caps text twice as much as mixed case, your compression algorithm sucks. Text is not random characters, it contains a lot of compressable repetitions, the very small portion of these that are affected by mixed case is negligible.
Consider this example:
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Yes, dear slashdot-readers, contrary to your assumptions there are some parts of the world in which other languages than english are written.
I for one have a keyboard featuring keys labelled ö/é, ä/à and ü/è for writing german and french. And of course, the only way to get Ö/É, Ä/À or Ü/È is capslock.
Even better, with my capslock turned on I get a load of special characters like this:
@ØÆßÐK""
Cool eh?
--
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
you want an old Sun keyboard. they had two columns of five (six?) keys on the left hand side. i don't remember all of them, but they included at least cut, copy, paste, select, and help.
so, somebody has thought of this. the issue was that less and less apps could be bothered supporting them over time, in the face of the fact that not everyone had one of these keyboards and everyone had key-combination shortcuts. there's also a good reason why they were alternately called the Sun Battleship Keyboard or Sun Aircraft Carrier Keyboard - they were friggin' huge.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Typing in British and Canadian postal codes is about the only time I can think of that I use the caps lock key. British codes look like:
LN6 2QJ
while Canadian ones look like:
N2M 5E5
The caps lock key has the avantage over the shift key in that it doesn't affect numbers. If I use the shift key, I tend to end up with something like:
N@M%E%
unless I'm very careful.