Slashdot Mirror
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. "
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.
That's absolutely right. If God hadn't meant for the Control key to be next to the "A" key, he wouldn't have put it there on the ADM3A.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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
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...
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That's hard to do when you're transcribing something off of paper, unless you like looking back and forth a lot.
=Smidge=
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
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.
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.'"