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?"

Comments

No! I use CapsLock as my "ESC" key

[ClarkEvans]

especially useful in VIM.

Yes.

[HenryKoren]

Naming convention in C++: Constants in ALL CAPS

Re:Yes.

[Pooua]

Some people actually know how to type, which means they use all the fingers on both hands to reach the necessary keys. More to the point, it means that holding down the shift key with one finger while trying to touch-type puts an odd strain on the hand and is poor typing posture. The shift key should only be used for at most 3 letters in sequence, and probably should be avoided for more than a single capital letter in a word.

USN

[mysterious_mark]

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

Re:Yes

[falzer]

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).

Happy Hacking

[yet another coward]

Use the Happy Hacking keyboard. It has no Caps Lock. Its Control key is in the right place.

Re:Computer freeze check

[Cerv]

But Num Lock and and Scroll Lock make Caps Lock redundant if that's all you ever use it for.

Re:Yes

[ejdmoo]

It's much easier to download this:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details. aspx?Fa milyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&Displa yLang=en

Then that has a nice little thingy called remap.exe. Let's you remap any key to any other. :)

Re:Replace it with a key labelled [help]

[moosesocks]

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.

Re:Yes

[Audity]

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.

The Military, for starters

[Akardam]

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.

Here's the official way of remapping keys:

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

Re:Yes

[JPriest]

Fixed link
Download is for "Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit"

Capslock is used all the time in the corp world.

[Viewsonic]

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.

Re:Computer freeze check

[Lehk228]

no, it's a low level windows fault, when the keyboard drivers are no longer functioning it is windows which has crashed

Re:What a silly question

[EvanED]

"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.

Re:What a silly question

[tlianza]

If you're going to get rid of a key, maybe scroll lock would be a better one. I don't think I've ever actually seen anyone use it for anything besides playing with the pretty lights.

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..."

Re:What a silly question

[BJH]

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.

Re:Replace it with a key labelled [help]

[runderwo]

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?

Easy. Because USB is not a perfect replacement for PS/2 input devices.

• There is a large amount of latency on the USB bus as well as software latency incurred due to processing the USB packets. There is practically no wire latency with PS/2 and the protocol is dead simple to parse. You can create a little microcontroller project to interface almost any simple device to a PS/2 port. With USB, you need a separate ASIC to even begin to get anything done.
• USB controllers typically share interrupt levels with other PCI devices. On systems without an IO-APIC, this translates into increased software overhead on every interrupt, because the interrupt handler for every device sitting on that interrupt is invoked. Whereas with PS/2 devices, you have an IRQ reserved for the keyboard and an IRQ reserved for the mouse. Since they are edge triggered ISA interrupt lines, there is no possible way for them to be shared even if you wanted to. Therefore the correct interrupt handler (and ONLY the correct one) is invoked in response to a PS/2 event.

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).

Re:Yes

[Frobnicator]

Caps are more easily readable on envelopes, some database and spreadsheet entries, titles of chapters, and many more writing applications.

I work with several different databases. All of our database data is stored in caps. Why? In decreasing order of significance:

• Postal Service Discount Requirements - Unless you like spending lots of money on mailings, use one of the discount mail formats, such as automatable mail. Automatable mail means CASS cerification, which means using all caps. Otherwise, the best bet is using an all-caps, 8-18 point sans serif, uniform stroke width font, 3/4 to 3 point space between characters. We found that 10 or 12 point ariel fits the requirements. If you use bulk mailing and you don't fit the requirements, the mail can be thrown out, not returned, so you wouldn't know that your mixed-case address had problems.
• Compression size - Your compressor should notice that almost all the data are of about 30 values {0-9, the common A-Z values, space}, and a few other symbols for the database system. That tiny alphabet, and considering the rarity of certain alphabet letters, will make dynamic huffman VERY happy. Mixed case would at least double the size of the compressed alphabet, meaning larger backups. If you do backups (you do, don't you?) it helps. If you have to distribute the database to different sites, it really helps. In one example I encountered recently, the client had about 6 GB of compressed data and wanted to send it to all of their stores nightly. Each store is equipped with a dedicated high-speed line, but 6GB daily (over 9 hours on dedicated T1) is too much for a nightly transfer. After looking at their data, simply converting everything to caps let it compress to just over 1 GB of data (under 2 hours over a T1 network).
• Uniform - It's easier to search for names that some people like to have different capitalization rules on (Shrudili/ShruDili/ShruDiLi, MacKay/Mackay, etc) Yes, you can do a case insensitive match (you insensitive clod) but it takes more CPU work; That's bad when a batch run already takes a long time for simple case sensitive matches.
• Readability - It's much easier to read names and addresses on the screen when they aren't mixed case.

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