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War Declared on Caps Lock Key
pieterh writes "I've launched a campaign to rid the world of the caps lock key. Sure, there are more serious problems to solve but please, think of the children! How am I going to explain to my kids why some of the most valuable keyboard real estate is squatted by a large, useless key that above all you must not press! Our campaign mission is simple: to send a message to the computer industry to force it (by any means necessary) to retire the CAPS key. It's going to be a hard, long, and possibly very embarassing war on uppercase, but some things just need to be done. "
The bottom left corner of my keyboard is harly prime real estate. Oh, you didn't leave the default PS2 keyboard mapping for Caps Lock did you? That's my Ctrl button like the good Lord intended.
taking down the caps lock key isn't enough, we must go for the head of the dragon - the windows key.
WHAT ABOUT THOSE OF US THAT HAVE TO USE CAPSLOCK TO ENTER DATA INTO A BUSINESS SYSTEM? WHERE WILL YOU LEAVE US???????
:-P
Ooops. Sorry, caps.
Seriously though, I know lots of people who's business requires them to enter data into their company's systems using caps. I don't know about you, but my little pinky would get extremely disfigured having to swap to and hold the shift button all the time. You'd slow typists down immeasurably.
While we're at it, can we get rid of NUM LOCK too? At least on normal 100+ key keyboards.
It should be on, not only by default, but all the time. We have arrow keys, Page up and down, Home and End, Insert and Delete between the letters and the right-side number pad. There's no need to duplicate those keys just beside it.
Only negative point: it was up to now a cool hack to make flash the LEDs indicating CAPS and NUM LOCK, like the Knight Rider car, or make it send messages in Morse.
i propose that keyboards should place caps lock up in no-man's land with Print Screen, Scroll Lock, and Pause/Break, rather than doing away with it completely. For the few times you actually would WANT to activate caps lock, it shouldn't be a problem for people to reach up there. And those who need caps lock a lot for their old programming language or somthing can use a legacy keyboard.
LOL, while it is annoying when people type in all caps and things like that, I use the caps lock key for legitimate reasons all the time. I'm in a data-mining job working on a UniData database and all UniQuery must be written in all caps. This would be a supreme pain to do sans a Caps-Lock key. This is just one of MANY things that falls under that umbrella. I also use the caps lock key as my "walk" key while playing CS. :-D
:)
Frankly...I find the idea of getting rid of the caps lock key...slightly appalling.
I don't mind it existing, it just pisses me off where it actually is.
Its one thing to have an accidental character in your text, its another to completely mess up the rest of the line.
liqbase
The image isn't a Goatse image is just an image of a keyboard with the caps lock button highlighted and the title DONT USE CAPS LOCK.
Not very intersting but not Goatse.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
That's one of the worst attempts to pump your own website I've ever seen for sheer crappiness.
in my job the poeple doing medical billing use software that requires all letter keypresses must be in caps also. perhaps the person starting this crap knows nothing of these worlds and is only concerned about all the all-caps emails and IMs and forum posts he sees.
...all cock-blockery aside...
I use home/end/pgup/pgdn all the time. Are there any replaces for them?
Same here, I work for a very large aerospace manufacturer and all the notes on the engineering documents are required to be in all caps.
Aparently the "War on Caps Lock" is spearheaded by someones who's entire computer world revolves around chatting with immature pre-teens online.
Collector's Edition
Okay... If the task requires a field to be in all caps why didn't the programmer just convert what every was entered in that field in all caps???
It isn't that hard to convert a string in to all up case. In most programing languages it is a built in function.
I would say who ever wrote your billing software needs to be replaced.
BTW why would you want to enter data in all caps anyway? It is harder to read than even all lower case and any good software would convert index strings into all one case so it isn't a problem with searching. If it is just because that is the way it has always been done I can understand. But then the software should deal setting the case and not the users hitting the caps lock key.
Sounds like bad software and or practices to me.
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That's hard to do when you're transcribing something off of paper, unless you like looking back and forth a lot.
=Smidge=
I think you might want to tell that to the programmer who wrote that cobol in the 70's.
In Spanish, it is very common to type in all caps - somehow it is considered acceptable to type words without accent marks if they are in all caps.
Only point being is that just because the caps lock is not useful in your language/culture, it doesn't mean that other languages/cultures don't find it useful.
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
"Addresses should be typewritten or machine printed in dark ink on a light background using uppercase letters."
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Sounds like, as discussed below, your software is to blame. Sure, it's important medical / rocket lauching software, but its still squirrly.
There are other solutions, how about making control-shift a standard for caps-lock? Or how about software that uppercases text entered in a particular field.
Surely some people remember SCROLL LOCK, which disappeared some years ago despite being carried forward for years.
For most people, the caps lock key is useless. Even for someone who uses it, you should at least agree that it certainly doesn't need to be right in home row. A lot of manufacturers will actually change the shape of it to prevent accidental pressings of it.
There are several useless keys that could be removed; print screen, and pause and the other two "lock" keys: scroll lock and num lock. I hate the num lock key as I usually use it immediately after keying in what I thought were numbers only to move the cursor around. I can't fathom why someone would chose to use the number keys as arrow keys when there are actual arrow keys sitting right there. Once those arrow keys were added back in the PC-XT days, they should've removed the num lock key.
No, the reason we still have useless keys is that something will break if we remove them. Scroll lock hasn't had a use that pertained to scrolling in years but some people still use the key for changing displays on a KVM. Your UniQuery work would be torture without that precious caps lock. It's called legacy.
We have shloads of function keys that people rarely use. We have recent additions like the "Windows" keys and the application key because we apparently need more modifier keys. Eventually these become useless legacy keys that continue to propagate to the next generation of computer keyboards.
Sure, get rid of the caps lock key but why stop there? Get rid of the other useless keys too. Change the letter layout to something that makes a bit more sense like Dvorak. People will complain because it does not have legacy support.
Best of luck to you though, you'll be heading down a long and painful road.
I've never understood why people carry on all-caps requirements that probably originated in the days of teletypes. I admit that at one point in time, it might have been useful to restrict people to a small number of characters to save a few bits, but nowadays it's not worth it. I have no idea of what company you work for and I'm not going to ask, but I will say that I have worked in places with old systems that still require all caps for text, even though the original systems have since been discarded and re-written any number of times. ("But we want to maintain the look and feel of the old system so that people are comfortable using the new system" - forgetting that anybody new they hire looks at it and says "WTF is this POS?"... but I digress)
Anyhow, I always felt sorry for anyone who actually had to read the all-caps mess. I occasionally read some stuff, and after a sentence or two the all caps text gave me the worst headache ever. Proper grammar and capitalization is meant to make language easier to parse. Purposefully leaving out capitalization just makes things hard to read.
I don't know, my password shows "******" whether or not I look at the screen. Unless you mean I should look at the screen, the light on the keyboard, my fingers, and the paper I might be transcribing simultaneously.
Better to put it out of range of the accidental finger.
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Exactly. Getting rid of caps lock is retarded. It's current location is retarded. War on Caps Lock? War on stupid keyboard layouts!
The enemies of Democracy are
I do understand. I write software for a living.
.001% of all users and is harmful or useless to the rest of them seems a bit silly.
Your answer isn't an answer to my question as to why they didn't put in that feature. It is a statement that the software you are using is lacking that feature.
You have hit on one of my pet peeves of software development. A disconnect between the people that write the software and those that use and support the software.
The feature I mentioned really is easy to implement. Why was this simple, error preventing , time saving feature left out of this piece of software?
How long have you been using this software? How long since that last update? Is it so perfect and bug free in every other way that no updates have been issued?
You have hit on one of my pet peeves. The idea that it is impossible to fix things. If you are paying for updates and support for a program you should have the option of requesting features that would make every users life easier. Your vendor should love the idea of putting in a 2 minute fix that would save many hours of work for it's users. It would help sell more systems or endear them to their current customers.
I don't think that deleting the caps lock is a requirement. I am all for remapping it to another function. However the idea of keeping a feature that is only helpful to
"And sorry to pick on you....its just that your post summed up a pet-peeve of mine. Sometimes it's not possible nor cost-effective to fix these things. So we deal with them the best way we can."
I don't feel picked on. But here is an answer to your statement. Why should I have to pay for your problem. Why should I have a useless key on my keyboard just because you don't want to fix a problem? It is right up their with why should I have to live with IE7 not following current standards because a bunch of retards built IE only websites that depend on a broken browser?
Like I said, I don't care if they delete the caps lock or not. I do care about bad software.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And on many other systems.
In this case, the SHIFT key is doing precisely what it says. If caps lock is off, it shifts to capitals. If it's on, it shifts to lowercase.
Don't complain when systems are logical.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That paragraph, right there, is TDWTF material.
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I don't understand how a control key to the left of A would be _easier_ to do keyboardless operation with. Try hitting Ctrl-X without moving the fingers of your left hand off of their home locations--pinkie on Ctrl (modern caps lock), ring finger on x. It's quite uncomfortable. Alternatively, you can move your whole hand and then deal with returning to the home row.
With ctrl in the lower-left, you just hold it down with the edge of your palm and have all your fingers in their natural locations. Even Ctrl-A is easy.
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For me, that reason is Civilization (2, 3, and FreeCiv, haven't played 4). Diagonal directions are very important. Clicking the mouse can be error prone (though goto is useful). I could probably remap the directions nethack-style onto the keyboard, but I've never gotten used to those keybindings.
In fact, this makes playing Civ for me much less convenient on a laptop. I often end up enabling num lock, and switching it off when I need to type a city name.
With num lock on, can the OS distinguish between num pad numbers and normal numbers? If that were the case, that'd work fine.
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Hey, Print Screen is useful if your are a developer or developing manuals, as you can copy to the clipboard what is currently on the screen, or use ctrl prtsc for the active window and paste it into a graphics program. And Pause is useful for pausing the screen on bootup, so that you can see important info before it disappears, as well as other uses when using the command line. Break is useful with the command line and with debuggers. Scroll lock is handy with Excel. But I agree with Num Lock, I don't think I've every turned it off on purpose.
Keyboard manufacturers: DON'T MESS WITH MY KEYBOARD. If you want to differentiate your keyboard, you can start by adding extra keys, which can be mapped to various functions. DON'T screw with existing keys.
Typing on a non-standard keyboard is extremely irritating. The worst keyboard I've used is one where the function keys were, BY DEFAULT, assigned to be those "Internet keys" (Help, Open, Save, Email, Web, etc.). You had to press some "Fn Lock" key in order to make them behave like proper function keys should, and every time you rebooted, the "Fn Lock" status got cleared. The same keyboard also had a double-height Delete key, and rearranged the Insert, Home, End, PageUp and PageDown keys, so I'd always end up pressing the wrong one. Oh, and I think it might have even screwed with the positions of the cursor keys, too, but I don't remember that one for sure.
The position of the CapsLock key is annoying, and I can see the justification for swapping it with the left Control key, but the manufacturers will inevitably screw it up, so it would be best if they just leave the keyboard alone, and let the software guys handle remapping and such.
Providing alternate keycaps would be nice, though, so that the labels printed on the keys could be changed to match the software keymap.
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