Google Wants To Take Away Your Capslock Key

heptapod writes "Slashdot reported earlier about Google's Chrome notebook and keen-eyed readers would have noticed the lack of a caps lock key. 'According to Google, this will improve the quality of the comments, because people will not be able to write all in capital letters. I'm not a fan of the caps lock key myself. I never use it, so it can go to hell, for all I'm concerned. But taking away choice from people is not good, especially when this is not going to improve the quality of comments.'"

Comments

You can't fix stupid

[elrous0]

Those of us who use it sparingly or for specialized reasons will be deprived of it. And those who USE IT TO ON EVERYTHING WITHOUT REALIZING IT'S THE EQUIVALENT OF SHOUTING will still be stupid. And stupid people will find a way to be annoying no matter what you do.

You could take every key but "a" away and websites/services will still be filled with denizens sporting aol email addressees posting:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Re:You can't fix stupid

[drinkypoo]

Those of us who use it sparingly or for specialized reasons will be deprived of it.

Easy, just replace it with shift-meta or something similar. It annoys me more than it helps me but I occasionally use it so I don't xmodmap the lock away... Not sure if there is any logic there but I think I just don't want to get used to it being another shift key for when I use someone else's computer.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[Yvanhoe]

I use the caps lock key a lot. On French keyboards, when a word begins with an accentuated letter, the only way to display it correctly is to hit caps-lock and press "é" or "à". Give me way to write easily É or À otherwise this is a (arguably minor) feature you remove from me.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[More_Cowbell]

"The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?"

Re:You can't fix stupid

[AmiMoJo]

Just set up an auto responder for emails that replies to any message that has too many ALL CAPS words with "YOUR CAPS LOCK KEY SEEMS TO BE BROKEN". Install a lameness filter on your forum.

I actually find people not using caps to be more of a problem an annoyance. When people order stuff via my web site they often enter their name and address entirely in lower case. I usually captialise for them because some postal services can be quite anal about it, especially Canada for some reason. When it is eBay though I print it exactly how the person has entered it just incase of a PayPal dispute. If you put exactly what they wrote and they still don't get it then it's their own fault and PayPal will side with you as long as you have tracking.

There is a reason many documents capitalise everything (e.g. name on a bank account or credit card) - it's because enough people are illiterate for capitalisation (or lack of) to be a problem. Rather than remove the key maybe Google should try to auto-correct, or just make the keyboard give you an electic shock every time you do it wrong.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[poetmatt]

beyond the hype of whether capslock should be there or not, what are they replacing it with? I couldn't make that out even from the photos.

As a note removing capslock would also completely screw over the typical keyboard layout too, nor would it prevent anyone from remapping capslock.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[BK553]

According to http://www.istartedsomething.com/20101208/fear-not-chrome-os-has-caps-lock it has an option. Crisis over.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[CrashandDie]

Under Linux, the only way to get a capital E with an accent on it (É or È, and loads of others) is by going to caps lock, and then hitting the correct key on the keyboard (on a French keyboard, where the 2, above a and z). Using shift results in "2", rather than a capital version of the special letter.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[IronWilliamCash]

I use the caps lock key a lot. On French keyboards, when a word begins with an accentuated letter, the only way to display it correctly is to hit caps-lock and press "é" or "à". Give me way to write easily É or À otherwise this is a (arguably minor) feature you remove from me.

I've been using only french keyboards forever and I never have had to use the caps lock key to get a capital É or À or È or  or Ù, etc. Shift works just fine, don't know how you have your keyboard configured but it would seem something is wrong.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[N1AK]

>

You could take every key but "a" away and websites/services will still be filled with denizens sporting aol email addressees posting:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Or take away the dedicated italic, bold and underline keys!.... Wait we don't have those? Talk about removing choice.

Deciding to drop hard keys isn't removing user choice. If you build it with a caps key you are making a decision for the user, without it, you're making another. Personally, I'm more than happy to save a bit of space for a more functional key, and have caps lock as a meta-key.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[IronWilliamCash]

Bash.org much? :P Nice quote though, it's a classic. IIRC it was George Carlin's quote.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[Darfeld]

I don't know how they do it in Chrome but caps-lock isn't a requirement for that. It's just how it works with the proper keyboard layout on Linux and it doesn't work like that on Windows. (Or at least, I don't know how to configure it... It's annoying, really.)

And there is a Way to type capital é or à or whatever on android already, so I can just hope they think about it for chrome too.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[Quirkz]

If they're smart, it'll be another Tab key. The only time I ever press caps lock is when I'm reaching for Tab and hit CL by accident.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[rockout]

You may not, but apparently everyone else needs to RTFA a little more closely. It appears to me that it's very likely that the reason for omitting caps-lock is just to save space, and a little joke about message board comments was taken a little too seriously by the so-called writer at Gizmodo. It also seems very likely that a double-tap on the shift key will toggle on caps-lock, as it does on the iPhone.

Really, how can you read that article and not come away with the feeling that the writer is a little clueless, or trying to create a story where there isn't one, or both?

Re:You can't fix stupid

[icebraining]

Really? We have accented characters in Portuguese and shift works fine, even on Linux. You should report it as a bug.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[swfranklin]

TFA is basically a troll. Starts with, "...looks like Google is pulling a Steve Jobs with Chrome..." - not exactly an unbiased statement.

Then, "According to Google, this will improve the quality of the comments". What, did he google on the word NO CAPS LOCK and come up with that quote? Whom did he ask? Was it an official comment or a joke?

Is there a soft caps lock feature? (I'm guessing yes). As infrequently as caps lock is legitimately used, a soft key sequence will work fine & free up keyboard real estate. I would not be surprised if the VAST majority of caps lock presses are accidental anyway.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[jo_ham]

It's Gizmodo, you pretty much have to start with those assumptions going in. Then you'll never be disappointed.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[nstach]

He's talking about AZERTY keyboards, not canadian bilingual. Shift + "é" will just give you "2".

Re:You can't fix stupid

[nightcats]

I still use it for entering CAPTCHA codes -- those images with cap letters and numbers. But flamers will be flamers whether or not they have a lock key as fuel for their flaming. So yes, idiots will be idiots and changing a keyboard won't make people suddenly mature.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[ricosalomar]

Get off my yard.

My compuserve address is a 6 digit int @compuserve.com

Re:You can't fix stupid

[Trelane]

Personally, I like to map the right Menu key to Compose. Compose+- L -> £; Compose+' e -> é; Compose+^ a -> â, etc. There's even Compose+m u -> ! Oh, and the quite important Compose+= c -> It's what helps me write little snippets of German and things when I'm in the US without going whole hog and using a German keyboard layout.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[zn0k]

> No, it sounds like they're putting the hate on Emacs users

Yes, they actually are.

http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-guide#TOC-Enter-the-chroot

> You cannot run programs on your filesystem from within the chroot. For example, if you are using eclipse as an IDE, or gedit to edit a text file, you will need to run it outside the chroot. As a consolation, you can can use vim. If you desperate for emacs, try typing sudo emerge emacs. Of course it will build it from source so allow 5-10mins.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[Pete (big-pete)]

I'm typing on a Belgian keyboard, and I would put an accent over an E by hitting ` or first, then typing the appropriate letter - È or É both typed without caps lock - I can't imagine French keyboards being any different.

-- Pete.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[CrashandDie]

It's not a bug, it's a different keyboard layout.

The Portuguese keyboard uses a qwerty layout, which means that the row of keys above qwerty... provide 123456 without the use of shift. An azerty layout, however, requires the use of shift to get the numeric value of the keys. For instance, on the French keyboard layout, as stated in my initial post, you need to use caps lock to get a capital É (same key as 2), or shift plus the key to get 2, or the key alone to get é.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[CAIMLAS]

Yep.

I use the Awesome window manager; I use capslock for meta. It's probably the 2nd most key on my keyboard (after space).

Meanwhile, CAPSLOCK ninnies will hold down Shift to get their work done. I've seen it happen when people's capslock key stops working "mysteriously".

There are already precious few 'meta' type keys on keyboards. Let's not 'standardize' on fewer, please: it makes work for those of us who work by the keyboard all the more difficult.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[realityimpaired]

There's several different kinds of French keyboards, though... Canadian French, and the French (from France) are the main ones, but there's also international keyboard layouts, more obscure French layouts, not to mention the schism between QWERTY, AZERTY, and Dvorak layouts.

Who's to say that the keyboard he's using to type French is the same as the one you are? He may very well be using a keyboard where CAPS really is the only comfortable way to type a capitalized accented character: I have seen "French" and "International" keyboards where the only way to get é is to use the Alt. Char button plus some other key, and I could see it being very uncomfortable having to do ALT-SHIFT-; to get a capital letter. Not impossible, but hitting CAPS and then typing the character would make things a lot easier.

That said, when I was having to type essays in French at school, we were told it's not the end of the world if you're missing an accent on a capital letter, and one teacher even told me the Académie Française had decreed that for typing, accents weren't needed on capitals.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[frenchbedroom]

French typography rules don't mandate the use of accented capitals, it's just arguably more readable (and a little nicer to people called Émile ;) ). I use a bepo keyboard layout (Dvorak-like layout for French) which gives me instant access to accented capitals. It took me one month to get comfortable with it, I haven't looked back at azerty since.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[choko]

Think of gizmodo (and all gawker properties) as the Jerry Springer or Maury of the internets. Try not to take them seriously. It will only piss you off.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[inode_buddha]

MEEE TOOOOO!!11ll elebenty-eleben LOLZ

Re:You can't fix stupid

[jandrese]

How about an honest to god accent key instead? That would seem to be better than the otherwise mostly useless capslock key. I wouldn't mind that on all keyboards in fact, since it could be mapped to all sorts of useful functions depending on which program you're using. If you're writing equations, it could be mapped to produce the corresponding greek letter for instance.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[The Archon V2.0]

Bash.org much? :P Nice quote though, it's a classic. IIRC it was George Carlin's quote.

A more appropriate bash.org quote:

#835030 +(17910)- [X]

<Khassaki> HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!
<Judge-Mental> try pressing the the Caps Lock key
<Khassaki> O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!!
<Judge-Mental> fuck me

Re:You can't fix stupid

[Socguy]

All caps is annoying and if this stops half the nitwits from using it excessively I'm all for it. If you have something so important to say that it must be in all caps... YOU CAN HOLD DOWN THE SHIFT KEY.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[Kijori]

The idea that accents are optional on capitals in French is a myth; they aren't (and never have been, although see the next sentence) and occasionally it can be confusing when they are omitted. Their omission was common when moving type was still in use simply for practical reasons, but now that that's not an issue there's no reason to carry on the practice and good reason to abandon it. For clarity, here's the position of the Académie Française:

"On veille donc, en bonne typographie, à utiliser systématiquement les capitales accentuées, y compris la préposition À, comme le font bien sûr tous les dictionnaires [...] ou les grammaires [...]
A quick translation:
"Correct typography therefore requires that one is careful to systematically use accented capitals, including the preposition À - as is done, of course, by all of the dictionaries [...] and grammar books"

Re:You can't fix stupid

[rockout]

I agree. The level of disappointment was heightened, though, by the fact that Taco took this "google wants to control your CAPS" and ran with it as if it were fact (is he a dumbass or also trying to create a story?) and there were some 200+ posts that were debating the merits of Google doing this. Did it really go over that many people's heads?

Re:You can't fix stupid

[k8to]

Compose-'-E
Compose-`-A

At least, that's how I type them on a us-oriented keymap.

Do french keymaps really not provide a way to type these common letters more directly? Whose keymaps? These things vary by platform.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[Yvanhoe]

Maybe good fro qwerty layouts but in my case, lowercase é à è are just one keypress and are very common in French. I just need two more keypresses on the rarer occasions when I need a capital accentuated letter.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[farrellj]

Personally, I think not only the caps lock key is a redundant artifact of a typewriter heritage, but it's also displaced the proper position of the control key! I *always* remap my keyboard so that the control key is beside the "a" key...works better on the command line, and in WordStar-like editors, eg. "Joe".

If it is where the control key is on keyboard, there would be a lot less accidental shouting on the net!

Re:You can't fix stupid

[DrgnDancer]

I was thinking this too. SQL statements and C statics were the main things I could think of that are typically caps locked. Though to be fair, this device doesn't look like it was designed for doing a lot of coding, and in both cases the all caps format for these statements is more a matter of convention than necessity. As far as the SQL interpreter on most modern databases is concerned "select", "SELECT", and "SeLeCt" all mean the same thing. C static names are, of course, case sensitive, but as long as you call "SaTiC2" the same thing through the whole program the compiler doesn't care what case you use.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[JackOfAllGeeks]

You could take every key but "a" away and websites/services will still be filled with denizens sporting aol email addressees posting:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaa

If you took every key but 'a' away, wouldn't EVERY post just be "aaaaaaaaaaaaaa"?

Re:You can't fix stupid

[JCholewa]

"the only way to get a capital E with an accent on it (É or È, and loads of others) is by going to caps lock, and then hitting the correct key on the keyboard"

This is incorrect. I use the Compose key all the time for less common characters. It goes like this:
Compose ' E creates É
Compose ` E creates È

There's a whole load of standard options, but you can create a ~/.XCompose with obscure looking content like this:

<Multi_key> <y> <e> <n> : "¥" # yen (currency)

Then you tap your compose key and tap the two or three keys after it that define the character.
Compose < 3 would make a heart symbol, but I can't show you it because /. is stripping out even the ampersand codes for most obscure characters (fwiw, Compose ? is my code for the irony mark)

"Only" is a word you should never use in the Linux/BSD/etc world.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[CannonballHead]

The author is just mad he didn't find a misplaced tablet in a bar.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[dangitman]

The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity

Maybe not, but perhaps there should be CAPITAL punishment for stupidity?

Re:You can't fix stupid

[icebraining]

Oh, OK. That seems incredibly cumbersome, but I guess it's just a matter of habit.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[fucket]

If they're smarter than you, they'll be VI users and it will be replaced with another "Esc" key.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[Erikderzweite]

What about compose key?

Re:You can't fix stupid

[PRMan]

Actually, keys I could stand to see removed:

Caps Lock
Insert
Scroll Lock
Pause/Break (only useful for System Properties shortcut or to read text on bootup)
Right Windows Key
Menu Key

Keys that would be more useful:

Bold
Italics
Cut
Copy
Paste
Print
Save
Select All

That said, F-Lock wasn't a horrible idea, just a bad implementation to remove F-Keys which are useful in Explorer and Programming. And all us programmers have all the Ctrl keys for those memorized anyway.

It's easy to write your own keyboard driver with the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator. I made one that allows me to type all the stuff I used to bring up the character map for by giving myself an AltGr key on my right Alt. I can now type copyright symbols, fractions, Greek & math characters, European language characters, etc. with ease.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[syousef]

You may not, but apparently everyone else needs to RTFA a little more closely. It appears to me that it's very likely that the reason for omitting caps-lock is just to save space, and a little joke about message board comments was taken a little too seriously by the so-called writer at Gizmodo. It also seems very likely that a double-tap on the shift key will toggle on caps-lock, as it does on the iPhone.

I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE TRUTH!!!!! GO FUCK YOURSELF GOOGLE!!!!

Re:You can't fix stupid

[HTH NE1]

i Don"T NEed no cAPSloCKs

Indeed, there are people so intent on being annoying in public that they will post in alternating case, which they can do without the luxury of a caps-lock key.

(With the above being the closest example of that here leads me to believe that slashdot has specific filters against it.)

Re:You can't fix stupid

[Darinbob]

I use the capslock constantly. I have it mapped to control like any sane keyboard should.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[doctorfaustus]

But it's really not like shouting. It's just capital letters - it gives emphasis without the ill effects of shouting. So no need to get upset about it, ever. That's just a web myth, a fantasy. Quit spreading it. And don't pretend it hurts your eyes or ears.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[gl4ss]

iirc the shift button has even a capslock indicator led, on the released pictures.

but that's not what people should be bothered about, it's that they're messing with the normal key-layout, renaming function keys too. it will make it a bit harder to switch between regular qwerty and that and it's not meant as the only os you'd have either..

chrome os is a massive project without actual unique use cases, that's the problem and a problem that many google projects have. missing the capslock key is the only thing to take home from the latest pr from google about chrome os, they didn't tell anything else that would matter or be of interest to anyone, sure they slipped some manufacturer names but they were hardly surprising nor do we even have a date nor is the sw even ready(actually it's ready, it just doesn't offer any reason to switch to it! so it's labeled as not ready. it's all also very late, but that doesn't matter because nobody would be buying it anyways).

oh and the decision to go non-normal pc route in regards of booting? just aping apple and making it tougher for hw manufacturer to drop google out of the money loop - the boot drive isn't really read only if you can update it and if you can't update it then it's quite undesirable.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[Rhaban]

On my computer, Shift+é is 2. Caps lock + é is É.

That's on linux: on windows, caps lock + é is 2, and É is alt + 02##.

I guess I could configure it to work with shift, but don't feel the need.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[commodore64_love]

>>>Isn't it ironically cool to have an AOL email address yet? I thought it was the new hipster trend.

commodore_amiga_love@aolnetscape.com
tres' cool
;-)

Re:You can't fix stupid

[Phoghat]

Those of us who use it sparingly or for specialized reasons will be deprived of it. And those who USE IT TO ON EVERYTHING WITHOUT REALIZING IT'S THE EQUIVALENT OF SHOUTING will still be stupid

What specialized reasons do you use it for? It is just a pain in the arse, for example netbook users who accidently hit it because of the keyboard size. It is much like the human appendix, which may have served a purpose in the past, but now is ripe for removal when it it can only cause problems

Re:You can't fix stupid

[Celestialwolf]

Not capital punishment, but maybe capital-locking punishment.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[ikirudennis]

obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/810/

Re:You can't fix stupid

[shawb]

They're replacing it with a "search" key. Probably works just like the magnifying glass button on an Android phone.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[frenchbedroom]

I stand corrected. All the more reason to keep using my keyboard layout !

e.e. cummings approves

[eldavojohn]

And stupid people will find a way to be annoying no matter what you do.

Like just holding down the shift key?

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[somersault]

Stupid people probably don't even know shift works for caps. I've seen people pressing caps just to get a single capital letter in their password.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[dintech]

I have a colleague who uses her mouse upside down. Meaning invert x, invert y, clicking with her thumb, cable facing downwards. She says that's just how she started using it and it never occured to her to use it the other way. She's no less accurate than I am with a mouse either.

I've heard stories of one individual completely stumped when he ran out of desk space but couldn't move the mouse cursor any more to the right than the middle of the screen. Clearly he didn't realise that you pick the mouse up...

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Doug Neal]

And stupid people will find a way to be annoying no matter what you do.

Like just holding down the shift key?

Yes.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to know what else she does backwards...

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[a_nonamiss]

I would say that holding the mouse upside-down is quirky, but not necessarily stupid. You realize that everything you've ever seen in your entire life is upside-down, because your eyeball contains only one lens, right? You're so used to seeing it that way, that you don't even think of up as down and vice-versa, because you've only ever seen it that way your whole life.

By my logic, your colleague may be one of the few people that actually holds the mouse correctly.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[L4t3r4lu5]

Mate of mine is a lefty, but used his mouse in a right hand configuration. He just positioned the mouse in his hand so his left index finger was over the left mouse button, and moved it between the two buttons as needed.

Six months ago I switched it for him. His immediate reaction was "Oh wow that's much better!"

He wants a technical job in IT.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[milkmage]

this really isn't any different than inverting the Y axis in an FPS.. to some people, it just makes more sense.. it does to me in flight sims - push up to dive but not FPS push up to look up. it can't be too "abnormal" - most games ask you about it in the training level.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Ephemeriis]

Stupid people probably don't even know shift works for caps. I've seen people pressing caps just to get a single capital letter in their password.

I was absolutely amazed the first time I saw this...

I'm now absolutely dismayed at how common it is...

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[wvmarle]

Plenty of lefties don't want buttons switched, as the right-hand setting is what you will encounter at almost any other computer. Better just get used to that.

And for the rest it's indeed sometimes strange that people just don't get the idea that something may be easier to do in another way. It's what makes inventors, that are the people that have an eye for such problems.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Bob-taro]

Mate of mine is a lefty, but used his mouse in a right hand configuration. He just positioned the mouse in his hand so his left index finger was over the left mouse button, and moved it between the two buttons as needed. Six months ago I switched it for him. His immediate reaction was "Oh wow that's much better!" He wants a technical job in IT.

I'm a lefty, and I just press the LMB with my middle finger and RMB with index finger. I suppose that might sound weird to a "righty". So I imagine on this caps-lock-less keyboard someone will just create a soft caps lock key (press shift twice quickly, or hold shift down for a second, or somesuch).

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Dishevel]

He will most likely get that job.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[ChefInnocent]

CAPSLOCK or Shift
________are those keys that
________flitter ravenblack words
________________________________acrossmyscreen
windowsmenumeta
________________are
___________________keys
_______________________that
___________________________fly
______________________________me
________________________________around
______________________________________invisiblespace


gOOGLE
take not my expressive locks controls and alternates.
Some User lackingnbsponslashdot

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[frenchbedroom]

I'm right-handed but I use my mouse my the left hand. That way it's closer to the keyboard, I mean, the part of the keyboard I use all the time, the letter keys of course. And I can reach it with only a minor movement of my left arm instead of having to go aaaall the way to the right, past the arrows and the numpad.

Combined with a bit of knowledge about keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-Ins : Copy, Shift-Del : Cut, Shift-Ins : Paste) and drag and drop (select some text, drag it with Ctrl key pressed : easy copy-paste), I find it a very ergonomic disposition. And it didn't take very long to learn to use the mouse left-handed (my right hand is still more precise though).

I haven't inverted the mouse buttons though, because I like to use it with the right hand from time to time.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Machtyn]

I have been known to handle to different computers, mouse in each hand in right-hand configuration, just fine. Middle finger of left hand does all the left clicking, pointer does the right click. Not hard to wire your brain to figure that out... at least, not hard for me to train my brain to think like that.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Machtyn]

handle two different computers... apparently my fingers don't always listen to me.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Nadaka]

I am left handed and use the mouse with my right hand, because that is where the mouse goes, and it requires less dexterity than touch typing or hitting the right key sequence while playing a videogame.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Obfuscant]

I've heard stories of one individual completely stumped when he ran out of desk space but couldn't move the mouse cursor any more to the right than the middle of the screen. Clearly he didn't realise that you pick the mouse up...

A user interface that requires you to keep picking up the pointing device to have full range is as stupid as a UI that makes you keep moving your hand back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard. It's inefficient and annoying. The mouse issue means you are making the same movements with different results. Move it while on the desk, cursor moves. Then you have to move it BACK the opposite way and the cursor doesn't move...

I got so tired of this with my limited desk space that I switched to a trackball. Everywhere. Small movements of my thumb give complete control of the cursor. The Logitech Trackman -- great product. But it's getting hard to find them anymore.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[gid]

I've heard of experiments quite a while back where they had people wear specials glasses that flip everything upside down, after a period of time, people got used to it and essentially started seeing everything right side up again. That is until he had the people take the glasses off when everyone started seeing things upside down without the glasses, so it took them a while to get used to normal vision before they started seeing everything right side up again.

Not really any relevance here, but it's very interesting to me. :)

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[djonsson]

Or using whatever method they chose to invoke caps lock. While it's true that they have removed the caps lock key, they still have a caps lock indicator and presumably caps lock in some form, possibly long pressing shift or something like that. The Caps Lock Indiciator can be seen on the leaked slide of the keyboard.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Firethorn]

You want wierd? My dad is right handed, uses his mouse in his left hand. Standard config, just on the opposite side fo the keyboard.

Trick is that he's an accountant. Easy access to the numberpad is more important to him than any extra control of the mouse.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Timmmm]

I'm right handed but often use a mouse with my left (my dad is left-handed). Swapping the buttons would just be really really confusing!

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[ganjadude]

You are not the only one, I do the same thing. I just wish that my logitek MX mouse was made to "fit" the left hand. Even if i had a left handed mouse, I would keep the buttons in the right handed profile, im just used to it

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Omestes]

Messing around with my mouse, and I really can't figure how the hell you do that. Are you clicking with your palm? I can't quite get my fingers to actually hit the buttons. Not commenting on your choice, just pondering the technical aspects. I've been involved in flamewars over lefties using the mouse on the left side (as flamee), and using the actual "left-handed" settings (as flamer), so how you use your inputs (as long as it is consensual) isn't that big of a deal.

Also; using your mouse upside down isn't a big deal; use your keyboard upside down and you will earn my respect (while keeping a decent WPM).

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Omestes]

Please don't do that for me. I like using my mouse on the left side with righty buttons, it makes it easier to adapt to mouses in other places, so I can just move it across the keyboard and use it normally. There also isn't much of a difference in efficiency between using your middle finger to left click over using your index finger. To be more specific, I have never noticed any difference whatsoever.

Though honestly, in places that are not my home, I generally just use the mouse like a genuine right handed individual, with no problems. Most lefties are slightly ambidextrous (more so than most righties) so mouse placement isn't that big of a hindrance. I can pretty much use the mouse in any position with any hand. Sometimes I piss off my girlfriend by using the mouse on the left side with my right hand while drinking or writing with my left.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[wiredog]

I keep my mouse right handed (but on the left side of the keyboard) so that my co-workers can use it without having to reconfigure it every time.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[rdforsyth]

WHY HOLD IT DOWN WHEN YOU CAN TAPE IT DOWN?!?!!?!? Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. so I'll just add some non caps to bypass the filter. la la la la la ilovecheeseitssogoodialsolikestrawberries P.S. if tape doesn't work, you can always use a two part epoxy.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[93 Escort Wagon]

Mate of mine is a lefty, but used his mouse in a right hand configuration. He just positioned the mouse in his hand so his left index finger was over the left mouse button, and moved it between the two buttons as needed.

I'm a lefty, and that's actually how I prefer using a mouse. For some reason it works better for me than switching the buttons - maybe because it doesn't require any thought if I switch to someone else's computer, or maybe because I mouse somewhat ambidextrously.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[MartyBorg]

I have a colleague who uses her mouse upside down. Meaning invert x, invert y, clicking with her thumb, cable facing downwards. .....

Good lord. I met a woman in Iowa who did exactly that, and I assumed that she was a one-of-a-kind!

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[owlstead]

We are hiring. He can at least see if something is good, which is - in my opinion - a step up from what I am getting "used to".

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[quacking duck]

I'm in a technical job in IT. I'm right-handed. The mouse is left of the keyboard, standard configuration. Index finger switches between left and right button as needed, the rest of my fingers are curled and rest on the sides of the mouse.

This is much better at preventing carpel tunnel than palming regular-shaped mouse and stretching your first two fingers on the mouse buttons.

I used to mouse with my right, but switched when I started to feel carpal tunnel strain after starting to use Windows at work ten years ago (grew up with and still use Mac at home). I now mouse with the right only for games or when high precision is needed.

Trackpad with my right hand though; 2-finger tapping to get a secondary click beats the hell out of a physical right button, and 2-finger scrolling beats the hell out of wasting the right margin.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[AndyAndyAndyAndy]

It's all how you learn. If nobody points out the better way to do it, at least a few people will think Caps Lock is the only way to do that. I've seen people type 80-90wpm while doing that method. It's stupid, sure, but it's just like how I don't use my thumb to hit spacebar. You can make your own way.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[BrokenHalo]

Tihs has nothing to to with the case in point. Messages delivered entirely in upper-case are widely perceived as "shouting" unnecessarily, and thus the practice is discouraged.

If you think about it, there's no logical reason for the existence of a caps-lock key at all. The absence of such a key does not impede proper capitalisation for those of us (like myself) who don't touch-type properly, while legitimate combinations for capitalised letters (usually 3 to 6 characters) are applied to acronyms easily manageble for most people.

[Incidentally, my keyboards have Caps-Lock disabled since the only occasions when I use the key are by accident.]

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[VolciMaster]

(Ctrl-Ins : Copy, Shift-Del : Cut, Shift-Ins : Paste)

It would seem Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X, and Ctrl-V (or Cmd on a Mac) would be easier and have the keys closer together

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[DragonWriter]

While it's true that they have removed the caps lock key, they still have a caps lock indicator and presumably caps lock in some form, possibly long pressing shift or something like that.

Well, its true that they have removed the caps lock key, except for the fact that its completely false and the key is still there. Its default function and labelling have been changed, though there is a setting on the Settings menu to switch the function to "Caps Lock" instead of "Search".

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[AK Marc]

I know a number of places that still have databases where the policy is to put everything in in all caps to fix issues of sorting mixed case (on ancient systems) and duplicate entries. After all, if the database sees McDonald and Mcdonald as separate names, MCDONALD for everything fixes that.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[bhebing]

I'm a righty (sic?), but can mouse left-handed as well. Of course I don't switch the buttons every time I switch the mouse, so my left hand uses the middle finger for the LMB. If you really want to confuse me for some time, give me a proper left handed mouse.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Ihmhi]

It does have its legitimate uses. What about someone with, say, one hand? Or one finger? Capslock H Capslock e l l o period, one key at a time.

Though to be fair, it's been rendered sort of redundant by Stickykeys (which has been around for quite a while now - at least 15 years). If you don't know what it is, press Shift five times in a row. It basically turns modifier keys (Alt, Shift, Ctrl) into toggles instead of holds. Stickykeys would change the above "Hello" example to Shift H e l l o period, so it's more efficient as well.

Ultimately, capslock only really is useful when you have to type a lot of capital letters in sequence, but I imagine lots of disabled persons (or just poor typists) use it in place of Shift and in lieu of the knowledge of Stickykeys.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[IB4Student]

Why would you pick the mouse up? That's so inefficient :-/ I have 2720 horizontal pixels (two monitors) and my mouse can move across all of it just by moving it 4 cm. I don't understand how some people live with such low mouse sensitivity.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[sac13]

Mate of mine is a lefty, but used his mouse in a right hand configuration. He just positioned the mouse in his hand so his left index finger was over the left mouse button, and moved it between the two buttons as needed. Six months ago I switched it for him. His immediate reaction was "Oh wow that's much better!" He wants a technical job in IT.

From what I've seen in the industry, he as qualified as many that are working today... even in this economy.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[mattack2]

A Search key? Damn, I thought they at least had the sense to put the control key back where it belongs (like the OLPC did). So this situation is actually *WORSE* than "caps lock where control belongs", since that's easily remappable on computers nowadays (it's in the Keyboard & Mouse pref pane on Mac OS X).

(I'm typing on an Apple Standard keyboard through an ADBUSB converter, so I don't have the problem on my main computer.)

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[RadioElectric]

Except the retinal image in the brain is not "upside-down", because there is no such thing as "upside-down" when it comes to patterns of electrical activity in your brain. This guy's behaviour is strange because relative orientation in the outside world is something that does really exist.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[wierd_w]

The use of all caps is standard on most (all?) engineering blueprints and drawings. I would get carpal tunnel VERY quickly without my capslock key. (My job title is "quality engineer", but I am essentially a glorified computer draftsman. I make and read blueprints all day.)

This is because these documents often get photocopied for shop floor use, and all caps letters are more legible on the print than is a mix of caps and lower case letters, like would normally be seen in typical human correspondence.

While I am sure you and google mean well, leave my capslock key alone. If you want to combat morons that feel the need to type in all caps on message boards, then do it with a submission filter. (Like the kind that check for profanity, etc.)

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[SanityInAnarchy]

That doesn't seem too strange -- it's just a question of whether you'd rather chord or type multiple characters.

I mean, I use shift like everyone else, but using caps isn't necessarily an indication that the person is stupid, just quirky.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Burning1]

I'm right handed, and use my mouse with my left hand (holdover from hunt-and-peck typing days, despite the fact that I've since taught myself to touch type.) Despite that, I leave the mouse in the right hand click configuration. Sometimes, standardizing my mouse with every other mouse in the world is better than being able to 'left-click' with my index finger.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Tetsujin]

It does have its legitimate uses. What about someone with, say, one hand? Or one finger? Capslock H Capslock e l l o period, one key at a time.

The need for one-handed typing has largely been negated by the proliferation of video chat. :)

But there's a shift key on each side of the keyboard. You can type shift plus any single letter one-handed. Of course, some people physically aren't capable of this - in that case, there are more advanced accessibility options they can activate.

Though to be fair, it's been rendered sort of redundant by Stickykeys (which has been around for quite a while now - at least 15 years). If you don't know what it is, press Shift five times in a row. It basically turns modifier keys (Alt, Shift, Ctrl) into toggles instead of holds.

Personally I can't stand stickeykeys. Sometimes I'll press a key and realize I didn't need to press it - in that case, I really don't want it to "stick"... Or I'll hold down shift and not necessarily know immediately what other key I want to press. I have turned on Stickeykeys by mistake in the past, just through my regular keyboarding habits...

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[similar_name]

Most lefties are slightly ambidextrous

I think this is just the result of being naturally left handed and society making everything for right handed people. With practice I think right handed people are just as ambidextrous. Unless a righty breaks their right hand they are unlikely to teach there left hand how to do anything other than be a retarded date.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Omestes]

Existing in a world of, and being trained by, mostly right handed people probably play a roll. I have, though, seen studies saying that lefties are more ambidextrous because of neurological reasons as well. It has been awhile since I read any research on it, but if I recall correctly lefties motor area is distributed between hemispheres more than right handed individuals (whose motor functions are mainly on the left hemisphere). Basically, they have a sloppier neural mapping than righties, which leads to it being easier to switch hands.

This explains some of the odd hand preferences that left handed individuals have. I, for example, write, eat, and pitch in baseball with my left hand, but bowl and bat with my right. I can golf (very badly) with either hand with no real difference in play. My observation of my preference is that I mainly use my left hand for things that require fine motor function, and use my left for functions requiring more force or coarse movement. True lefies (as compared to a majority of right handed individuals) are very rare, with most lefies being mostly to somewhat ambidextrous.

As in most things with dual potential causes, it would be very hard to pick which factor is the main one, since there probably is some mix of causes (both neurological and social) which varies from individual to individual. But it is pretty much beyond depute that both play roles in hand preference.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[redJag]

You mean you're a QUALITY ENGINEER, right? This comment brought to you by Caps Lock!

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I want everyone to use the mouse the same way I do, so I just go around breaking right arms.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[dintech]

There's a poster above that says he is the same. That's three. I suspect it's some kind of alien invasion.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[nstach]

The palm actually almost never moves. "right click" with the thumb, "left click" with the index. The wrist almost never moves. Which is both an advantage and a drawback. It means it's pretty much impossible with low sensitivity on the mouse, but it's more accurate on high sensitivty since only the wrist moves, not the entire arm. To me, using the mouse the "right" way is approximately just as alien as using a keyboard backwards. The worst part of it was when everybody got Infrared wireless mice, those just will not work backwards and I just couldn't use other people's computers. I thank god every day for the end of that era.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[node 3]

You realize that everything you've ever seen in your entire life is upside-down, because your eyeball contains only one lens, right?

This is silly. The image on the retina is upside-down, but the retina is not where seeing happens. It would be like saying all the photos you take are upside-down (and left-right flipped) because the image on your camera's CCD is transformed in this way.

By my logic, your colleague may be one of the few people that actually holds the mouse correctly.

This is sufficient evidence to completely disregard your logic. Mice are specifically designed to be used in a certain way, and with the cord running down is not that way.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Your.Master]

I was *taught* to hit caps lock for single capital letters. I refused, and the teacher let it slide so long as I didn't introduce others to this concept because I was already a skilled typist.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[HTH NE1]

You can have my ADB keyboard when you pry it from my cold dead hands.welcome datacompwelcome datacompwelcome datacompwelcome datacomp

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[caitsith01]

Combined with a bit of knowledge about keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-Ins : Copy, Shift-Del : Cut, Shift-Ins : Paste) and drag and drop (select some text, drag it with Ctrl key pressed : easy copy-paste)

You, sir, just improved my productivity by about 300%.

I too am right handed but use the mouse on the left, in my case due to a shoulder injury on my right side. I would say I am as proficient with my left hand as my right now, but shortcuts have been a constant hassle.

No longer! It never even occurred to me to check how left-handed people do it normally.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[caitsith01]

(Ctrl-Ins : Copy, Shift-Del : Cut, Shift-Ins : Paste)

It would seem Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X, and Ctrl-V (or Cmd on a Mac) would be easier and have the keys closer together

Actually, measuring on my Dell keyboard (at work), I get a distance of about 5 cm from the edge of Ctrl to the edge of V, while only about 4cm from the edge of Ctrl to the edge of Ins.

Factor in that a person using the mouse on the left has to move their hand off the mouse to use the left-side shortcuts and it makes sense that you would use them on the right.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[drharris]

Yes, I have caps lock remapped to control on all my systems. This design decision reduces my excitement to get one of these devices since I would not enjoy coding on that keyboard.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[a_nonamiss]

Unarguably, everything is projected onto your retina inverted, i.e. things in the top of your field of vision appear on the bottom of your retina. This is provable. If you're looking top-down at the mouse, and you have that mouse inverted, such that moving it up makes the cursor move down on the screen and vice-versa then the image of the cursor on your retina will unarguably move in the same direction as the mouse.

How you perceive that image is learned. If it were technically possible to remove your retina and re-insert it so that it was rotated by 180 degrees, (and otherwise undamaged) you would most certainly perceive that everything as upside-down. If you did the same thing to a newborn, (or more accurately, an in-utero fetus) it would have no effect on its perception of the world at all, because its brain hasn't yet learned to interpret the data from its eyeball. The retina just transmits data to the brain, which must then learn how to interpret it.

By the way, you missed that the whole post was tongue-in-cheek.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Ambvai]

There's a few games that solve this problem in a remarkably effective way: It just asks you to, for example, look up, towards the ceiling. And sets the Y-axis accordingly.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[similar_name]

My thoughts are that there is a genetic disposition putting each of us somewhere from extreme right to ambidextrous to extreme left and that society reinforces everyone's brain to use the right. So that truly genetically ambidextrous people would become right handed and people favoring their left would move towards ambidextrous. I think that's about the same as you are saying

Personally, when I have tried to write with my left hand I find it easier if I write in a mirror image to my right hand. It is more spatially correct relative to myself.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[node 3]

Unarguably, everything is projected onto your retina inverted

Clearly, but also unarguable is that that doesn't mean you see everything upside-down and left-right reversed, because the retina is not where seeing occurs. The idea that we see everything "upside-down" is silly. We see things properly. The image on the retina is transformed, but that's something else entirely.

By the way, you missed that the whole post was tongue-in-cheek.

No it wasn't. You were trying to make a point (which is why you are defending it now). My main issue here is the common, but silly, notion that we see everything upside-down. Seeing happens in the brain, not on the retina. The orientation of the image on the retina is irrelevant so long as the brain can properly interpret it (like you stated).

I realize your "maybe everyone else is doing it wrong" at the end was a joke, but you still had an intended meaning that "it's all relative, who are you to say how a mouse should be held!" At least, that's what I got from it.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Ritchie70]

Don't swap them for me either.

I'm left-handed but have mice on different sides of the keyboard on different computers. I think I use my index finger on both buttons no matter which side, always with a "right handed" mouse configuration.

I tried swapping them once. It was awful.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Ocker3]

I've worked in schools where the teachers have the kids do that as the correct way to type capital letters, it made me want to shake and cry. Surely being able to use two fingers at the same time on Shift and the key you want is a basic typing skill??

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[mug funky]

my wife does this, but her excuse is not having use of her right hand.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[initialE]

If you're using 1 finger to type, it's handy to use caps for capital letters.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[j_sp_r]

I switched to after my right arm became really painfull to use. Didn't switch the keys and getting pretty good it atm.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Ihmhi]

Incidentally, you can disable things like Stickykeys via the control panel if you so desire. Google it.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Wynter Stark]

Reminds me of a study -- I wish I could remember the name or better reference it. Participants were given goggles that made everything appear upside down. Eventually they got used to it and they began seeing normally with the headgear. When these were then removed, the world appeared upside down.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[malkien]

it took a few seconds to hit me.
fabulous.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[somersault]

It does have its legitimate uses. What about someone with, say, one hand? Or one finger? Capslock H Capslock e l l o period, one key at a time.

Well, the people I'm talking about have two hands, they're just really, really awful with computers. Even when typing one handed I still use shift. One finger, then yeah you don't have much choice. Bit of an extreme example though!

Even when I type all caps I still tend to use shift. Very occasionally I'll remember about caps lock. I suppose that could make me almost as bad as those who only use caps lock :P But actually, how do they get question marks and exclamation points if they don't know how to use the shift key?

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[somersault]

I have turned on Stickeykeys by mistake in the past, just through my regular keyboarding habits...

I did the same in the past when I used to use Windows - ended up just disabling it.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[peterbye]

I am right handed and use the mouse in my left hand, because I like to have my (paper) notebook open beside the keyboard and I can mouse with my left hand better than I can write with it.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[tehcyder]

The worst part of it was when everybody got Infrared wireless mice, those just will not work backwards and I just couldn't use other people's computers. I thank god every day for the end of that era.

I thought that apart from gamers and people with really old computers, wireless mice were now pretty standard nowadays?

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[tehcyder]

You should get him a usb number pad as a stocking filler this christmas.

No, because he will want to use the number pad with his right hand, not his left, and there is already one there on the right.

Trust me, I'm an accountant.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Misagon]

I get the same benefit by using only "tenkeyless" keyboards that don't have any numerical key pad ("tenkey").

I don't miss the numerical key pad on the right side of the cursor keys. First of all, I learned to type on a C-64 that did not have any. Later, in school and college, I usually used the left hand for the calculator while holding a pencil in the right hand.

The layout of the 104-key keyboard is mostly because of influences from historical systems.
DEC's computer terminals from the 1970's used to have a screen, keyboard and logic board in one case, with the screen on the left side and the logic boards to the right side of the screen.
It was natural to position the alphanumeric keyboard so that it was centered with the screen.
At this time, IBM's systems had the logic boards under the screen and the keyboard separate. IBM's keyboards had the alphanumeric part in the middle with different types of function and cursor keys on both the left and right sides. IBM used variations of this layouts for the IBM XT's keyboards.
Later, DEC conducted a study in how cursor keys were used, and that study resulted in the the inverted T-cluster that we have today. In DEC's earlier model, the cursor keys were located above the Enter key, and they had to be moved down to the right so that they could be used with the same hand as before ...
DEC's VT220 terminal with this layout became quite popular, and IBM just copied DEC's keyboard layout. Then the PC revolution took off, people got used to this layout, and the rest is history.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[AmiMoJo]

Funny you should mention video games becuase most gamepads seem to be left handed. The d-pad, the bit that needs the most precision, is operated by the left thumb. Arcade joysticks always seem to be on the left too. When I was a kid in the 80s I always held the stick in my right hand and used the left hand to hold the base and press the fire button. When I use a touch keyboard on my phone it is always with my right thumb. Game controllers make no sense to me.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[nstach]

yes, but bluetooth, not infrared. Bluetooth doesn't have to be aligned with anything

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Omestes]

Personally, when I have tried to write with my left hand I find it easier if I write in a mirror image to my right hand. It is more spatially correct relative to myself.

I've played around with trying to teach myself to write right-handed, but it has been, for the most part, an abysmal failure. Lefties write subtly different than right handed people to minimize dragging the hand over the writing area. In extreme cases you get the strange hunched style, where your arm completely surrounds the page so you can write from above, as opposed to straight on. The ideal solution would be to write only Arabic or Hebrew with your left hand. This somewhat confounds the mirror technique.

I try writing on two pages of paper, one with each hand, and mirroring each others output to the highest extent possible. Though the largest stumbling block is still holding the pen itself, it feels incredibly unnatural in my right hand, and its hard to get the muscles to do what I want them to do. Often they just twitch madly.

I'm sure with some work I could write like a 5th year old with my right hand (giant looping cursive), but the main problem is that there isn't much point. It isn't a skill that would be used enough to maintain. When I do need to handed note taking, I write with my left, and hunt and peck (speedily) into a text editor.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Omestes]

Do you just move the mouse with your fingers lightly on the buttons, then, and just apply slight added pressure to click? Or do you grasp its sides with something like your thumb and ring finger, and use your mouse fingers normally?

I tried this, but my mouse isn't really able to do either, it has very short walls on the button side, and its buttons are extremely sensitive.

Also, switching to things with embedded pointers (laptop nipples, trackpads, etc) must have been a pain, being forced to work on a "normal" axis.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[RockDoctor]

Stupid people probably don't even know shift works for caps. I've seen people pressing caps just to get a single capital letter in their password.

My wife does exactly that. But since she learned to type (and later, to operate computers) in Russian, that's entirely understandable.

(For those who don't know, the visual difference between most lower case Cyrillic characters and their upper case equivalents is minor in most typefaces. So, to be confident that you've got an upper case letter where you need one, the CapsLock ; [character] ; CapsLock cycle is rational.)

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Tetsujin]

Incidentally, you can disable things like Stickykeys via the control panel if you so desire. Google it.

Yes, I know. That's the first thing I did after I accidentally enabled it. The only reason this has happened to me more than once is because I've changed PCs and wound up with a clean install of Windows.

It is nevertheless annoying. Still, I can understand the compromise that leads to that annoyance: people who need it, need to be able to activate it easily.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[baubo]

The use of all caps is standard on most (all?) engineering blueprints and drawings.

Capslock also necessary on APA format papers which require running headers with the title of the paper in all caps. I just don't want to hold down the SHIFT key while I type in the title even one time.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[pookemon]

She's no less accurate than I am with a mouse either.

How is your parkinsons going btw?

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[Cimexus]

Yeah agreed. Problem is it's hard to switch regularly between the two, so people who are used to inverted mouse for flight sims end up using it in other games, such as FPS and MMO games where you have a camera control.

I grew up mostly playing flight sims, so I ended up being a mouse inverter in FPS too. In my head, it makes sense: pushing ~forward~ on the mouse is like moving my head forward on my neck, which would cause me to look ~down~. Similarly pulling back on the mouse is like pulling my head back, and thus looking up.

The reason this doesn't seem to make sense to other people is that they think of the mouse as moving 'up and down' (like a cursor on a screen), not 'forward and back' in three-dimensional space. But the mouse is on a horizontal plane, so to me, I'm moving it forward and back, into and away from the monitor.

But most people think I'm weird. People who invert mouse seems to be a dying breed among younger gamers it seems. I wonder how long it will be until games start not even having the option to do it. Basically anyone that never played flight sims (or doesn't understand how a control column works on a real plane) don't 'get' invert mouse at all.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[frenchbedroom]

Wow, just an off-hand reply about my keyboarding habits and I get a cool history lesson ! Thank you sir.

Re:e.e. cummings approves

[wildstoo]

My boss does this. Every time I watch him type something I die a little inside.

NOOOO!

[Corporate Troll]

YOU CAN TAKE MY CAPS LOCK KEY FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!

Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. No shit? That was the point....

Re:NOOOO!

[91degrees]

The filter also acts as a predictable joke filter.

Re:NOOOO!

[Corporate Troll]

Yes, but I expected it to do so, making the addition a joke on it's own ;-)

Re:NOOOO!

[slick7]

YOU CAN TAKE MY CAPS LOCK KEY FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!

yOU cAN tAKE mY cAPS lOCK kEY fROM mY cOLD dEAD kEYBOARD.
THERE, FIXED THAT FOR YA!

I'm a bit scared

[suso]

As much as I hate the caps lock key (reassigned mine to be an extra Esc), I just submitted a bug on Chrome that it doesn't have a command line --geometry option, which I consider a pseudo standard thing for X apps. I can't help but see that Google is going from the mostly standards compliant company they once were to becoming a Microsoft as far as following standards goes. I'm sure there are other examples people will bring up and maybe a comment along the lines of "They were never standards compliant".

Re:I'm a bit scared

[John Hasler]

I just submitted a bug on Chrome that it doesn't have a command line --geometry option, which I consider a pseudo standard thing for X apps.

Have you filed similar bugs against all of Mozilla's products?

Re:I'm a bit scared

[rubycodez]

don't get too scared, it's a very "beta" stage distro at this point. thousands of people complaining as you have can make things better

Re:I'm a bit scared

[Late Adopter]

There's also "middle click navigates to primary selection" which Chrome doesn't implement, and most people consider a standard for web browsers in X.

Re:I'm a bit scared

[Cow Jones]

As much as I hate the caps lock key (reassigned mine to be an extra Esc) [...]

Heh, I've one exactly the same thing. Vim user?

Re:I'm a bit scared

[langelgjm]

Yeah, I also reassigned caps lock to escape... it's great for vi users..

Re:I'm a bit scared

[PieSquared]

Some standards need to be changed, and what little I've seen of google ignoring standards has been ones I'd agree should be ignored. For example, I removed the caps lock key from my own keyboard.

Re:I'm a bit scared

[More_Cowbell]

Fresh install of Win7 yesterday. Chrome (browser) gets 100/100 on Acid3, while IE8 gets 20/100. I'm missing the point I'm sure?

Re:I'm a bit scared

[Blakey Rat]

Fresh install of Win7 yesterday. Chrome (browser) gets 100/100 on Acid3, while IE8 gets 20/100. I'm missing the point I'm sure?

Most of the stuff Acid tests has little to do with standards; IE scores so low on it because they decided this particular test was unimportant for real-world scenarios and not a priority. (And frankly, I agree with Microsoft on this one.) Your Acid3 score really says very little about how well you support web standards.

That said, IE9 will have a significantly higher score simply as a side-effect of the other standardization work they've been doing. It won't be out for a bit though.

It's great to have benchmarks so you can compare two products with a single number, but first you have to make sure the number is actually meaningful.

Re:I'm a bit scared

[lfd]

--geometry is only standard for X Toolkit based applications. Gnome applications have no support for this.

OMG!?

[digitaldc]

OMG WTF GGL?

Finally

[gweihir]

Personally I have both: Keyboards where I physically disconnected Caps-Lock and Keyboards where Caps-Lock causes trouble. I think, I have never, ever needed that key, not even once.

I am all for it!

Good Riddance

[Sonny Yatsen]

The Caps Lock key is an arcane relic of the ancient IBM keyboards and for most users, it's completely unnecessary. It screws up passwords, for one, and it is in a position that is way too easy to hit accidentally. Besides, there's been a movement to ditch it for ages now, and thus far nobody's complained. Did nobody notice that the OLPC computer also ditched the CapsLock? Besides, anyone who still wants to use all caps still has the shift button.

Re:Good Riddance

[jedrek]

While I agree with you, there are situations where caps lock is useful - when writing in caps along with numbers and punctuation.

Re:Good Riddance

[Zedrick]

The Caps Lock key is an arcane relic of the ancient IBM keyboards

"ancient" IBM keyboards (like the IBM 1391411 I'm typing this on) are about the only ones that doesn't have any "problem" with capslock (hitting capslock by accident), since it's clearly separated from the "a"-key and gives you plenty of feedback when hitting it (sound + feeling).

Of course, not having caps-lock might stop idiots from shouting, but they'll just express themselves in some other annoying way.

Re:Good Riddance

[jgtg32a]

The only time I need to do that is for CD keys and half the time those aren't actually case sensitive or they automatically put everything into upper case anyway.

Re:Good Riddance

[Sonny Yatsen]

Every keyboard I've ever used (well, every standalone keyboard) has the spaced gap between the 'a' and CapsLock key. The only keyboards that doesn't have the spaced gap that I've ever used are laptop keyboards, but they are generally bad for more than just that reason.

Re:Good Riddance

[rsimpson]

I don't have a problem with them taking away the functionality of the Caps Lock key, but I do have a problem if they take the actual physical key away. I currently have it mapped to Ctrl because it is in such a convenient place just left of my pinky, and navigating around vim I use Ctrl a lot. So the function of Caps Lock is pointless, but the actual key itself is very important.

Re:Good Riddance

[stewbacca]

If you are a touch typist, having to hold a shift key down for more than 2 capital letters in a row really slows down your typing speed and contributes more to repetitive motion injuries.

Re:Good Riddance

[sean.peters]

It screws up passwords, for one

Just about every operating system warns you when your capslock button is on during logon. For other password dialogs, you would generally notice the problem when typing in your username, so I can't help but think this is a pretty minor problem IRL.

Besides, there's been a movement to ditch it for ages now, and thus far nobody's complained.

You just haven't been paying attention. Every time this subject comes up on slashdot, a bunch of people (including me) complain about it.

Besides, anyone who still wants to use all caps still has the shift button.

You have got to be freaking kidding me. Type "NATO" using the shift key. Go ahead, I'll wait. And that's an easy one. I have to type acronyms all day long, and doing so without a caps lock key is a recipe for carpal tunnel syndrome, not to mention a massive slowdown in my typing rate.

Don't like capslock? Fine - don't use or remap it. But you can have my capslock key when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. I won't be buying a Chrome laptop.

Re:Good Riddance

[PiAndWhippedCream]

The Caps Lock key is an arcane relic of the ancient IBM keyboards

Keyboards? Try ancient IBM typewriters.

And we needed it. In Conclusion, get off my lawn, whippersnapper.

Re:Good Riddance

[rubycodez]

most people don't hit it accidentally going for the 'a', but rather shift or tab right after hitting a far-away key

Re:Good Riddance

[m.ducharme]

This. I was starting to think nobody on slashdot knew how to type properly.

Re:Good Riddance

[Hatta]

You have got to be freaking kidding me. Type "NATO" using the shift key. Go ahead, I'll wait.

NATOnatoNATOnatoNATOnatoNATOnato

No capslock, no problem. You must have little girlie hands.

$ time cat
THIS SENTENCE WAS TYPED WITH CAPSLOCK
THIS SENTENCE WAS TYPED WITH CAPSLOCK

real 0m6.806s
user 0m0.030s
sys 0m0.030s

$ time cat
THIS SENTENCE WAS TYPED WITH NO CAPSLOCK
THIS SENTENCE WAS TYPED WITH NO CAPSLOCK

real 0m6.657s
user 0m0.046s
sys 0m0.030s

Re:Good Riddance

[wondafucka]

The Caps Lock key is an arcane relic of the ancient IBM keyboards and for most users, it's completely unnecessary. It screws up passwords, for one, and it is in a position that is way too easy to hit accidentally. Besides, there's been a movement to ditch it for ages now, and thus far nobody's complained. Did nobody notice that the OLPC computer also ditched the CapsLock? Besides, anyone who still wants to use all caps still has the shift button.

Plenty of people have complained. Namely the people that design your electronics, especially your computer PCBs. Netnames are all caps. Holding down the shift button the entire time is ridiculous and really bad for repetitive stress. Luckily the people who know how to make your electronics, also know how to make keybinding macros.

Also, I have HUGE hands, and I can't recal a time I hit the CAPS lock key accidentally.

The bigger story is that they took away the FUNction keys.

Re:Good Riddance

[Jake Griffin]

So then you can alternate between the shift key on the left and the shift key on the right every 2 letters. Problem solved!

Re:Good Riddance

[stewbacca]

Except I'm a touch typist, and if the acronym has all of its letters on the left hand, you have to hold the right shift down the entire time. It's a real pain.

Re:Good Riddance

[Omestes]

I was starting to think nobody on slashdot knew how to type properly.

By properly do you mean quickly and efficiently, or do you mean by arbitrary rules I learned early on in my education?

By the time my school system offered typing classes I was already typing for 10 years and was pretty set in my ways. Our typing teacher was always pissed at me for not "touch typing" in the proper style (i.e. the style the text book told him we were supposed to use), and once he got over that he was very happy that my self-taught haphazard typing was faster than pretty much everyone in the class. It worked for me, it was better to keep doing what worked than screwing around with something that worked. If it isn't broke... etc...

I have yet to see the innate superiority of touch typing, so I can't really acknowledge it as proper.

Re:Good Riddance

[dangitman]

"ancient" IBM keyboards (like the IBM 1391411 I'm typing this on) are about the only ones that doesn't have any "problem" with capslock (hitting capslock by accident),

Hardly. Every Apple keyboard and laptop made recently (that's millions upon millions of keyboards) has protection against accidental capslock activation - you have to hold the key down briefly, it won't activate with just a tap.

Re:Good Riddance

[Kernel Kludge]

Historically, IBM keyboards like the 84-key on my trusty ol' XT put control left of A where it was on every other DTE/computer keyboard at the time. Unfortunately the AT keyboard put it back where it was on typewriters.

Personally, I remap caps lock on modern keyboards back to control as I use it far more often than even the shift keys. It's also how my finger memory was programmed an age ago. On typical terminals ^H is easier than reaching for backspace, ^[ for escape, ^I for tab, ^U for kill line not to mention all those handy vi and emacs editing commands. I suffer from tendinitis across the tops of my hands which is magnified by reaching for keys more than a keycap away from the home row. Control-below-shift is the worst with my little finger curling up to do the reaching.

Re:Good Riddance

[scot4875]

Type "NATO" using the shift key.

Pretty easy for me. I don't type "properly"; when I need to use the shift key, I always use left-shift, and position my left hand one key to the left. Makes it so my left index finger has to do a bit more work while typing all caps, but it's not difficult at all. I also type at about 100WPM. It's really not all that tough.

I can see how someone would have trouble with NATO doing things "properly", by going lshift+N, rshift+A, lshift+TO.

So, need capslock? Fine, map something to it. For the vast majority of us, it's a useless key.

--Jeremy

Re:Good Riddance

[CCarrot]

...there are situations where caps lock is useful - when writing in caps along with numbers and punctuation.

The only time I need to do that is for CD keys...

Actually, the text on most technical drawings is all in capitals, along with numbers and other punctuation. As far as I know it's to promote clarity and even out character spacing.

Of course, one could simply use a font that produces capital letters regardless of the typed case for these special cases...

Re:Good Riddance

[dfsmith]

People didn't care when Apple removed the PageUp/PageDown from the MacBook. (Of course, they lost at least one potential customer that way.)

Re:Good Riddance

[Jake Griffin]

WHOOSH!

Re:Good Riddance

[stewbacca]

Yay. I got whooshed by some sort of nerd reference? Care to explain?

Re:Good Riddance

[Jaxoreth]

Every Apple keyboard and laptop made recently (that's millions upon millions of keyboards) has protection against accidental capslock activation - you have to hold the key down briefly, it won't activate with just a tap.

This is even worse -- it means that Caps Lock won't engage when I hit the key normally, even intentionally. It means I can't rely on muscle memory but have to think about what I'm doing -- just to press a key.

Preventing accidents shouldn't come at the price of impeding correct behavior. And delay-sensitive interfaces inherently invite errors.

Re:Good Riddance

[Jaxoreth]

People didn't care when Apple removed the PageUp/PageDown from the MacBook. (Of course, they lost at least one potential customer that way.)

Did they? My unibody MacBook Pro has Page Up/Down (though they're not marked as such) but lacks the numeric keypad overlay, so typing "/* and "*/" is a pain.

Re:Good Riddance

[Jaxoreth]

I have yet to see the innate superiority of touch typing, so I can't really acknowledge it as proper.

It's probably more efficient if you're writing blocks of English text, but I suspect that the advantage disappears when writing code, due to the increased use of punctuation.

Re:Good Riddance

[SolarFuel]

Actually the Caps Lock is a much older relic. It was on nearly every manual typewriter, long before the IBM Selectric or the IBM PC keyboard. It worked by engaging a hook on the shift key, holding it down. On manual typewriters, holding down the shift key took muscle power, since you were holding up the whole weight of the platen (the roller), so having a caps lock wasn't just a convenience that reduced awkwardness, it actually relieved the stress on the finger.

Re:Good Riddance

[Cederic]

wtf?

NATO is piss easy to type with the shift key. SO IS THIS.

Maybe I'm fucking weird or something, but it's easier for me to type entire sentences USING THE SHIFT KEY than to shift my entire hand across the keyboard to hit the otherwise out-of-reach CAPS LOCK key.

No CAPS LOCK was used while writing this message, at around 70wpm while drunk.

Incidentally, if it helps, my right baby finger is used to hit SHIFT. It's also the finger I use to hit RETURN (unless I'm trying to do SHIFT-RETURN, in which case it's my left baby finger and my right baby finger working in harmony together. And that's got to be celebrated.)

Re:Good Riddance

[Lonewolf666]

For me, accidentally hitting CapsLock in games was the reason to go from WASD to DYXC (German keyboard, on a US layout it would be DZXC).

Stupid annoying key, because I never type long enough texts in all caps to make it worthwhile. IMHO, good riddance if it disappears some day.

Re:Good Riddance

[Lonewolf666]

If typing is a major slowdown when writing code, you're probably doing it wrong. As in, writing waaaay too much repetitive code that should be extracted into subroutines.

In my experience, thinking takes a much larger part of development time than typing.

Re:Good Riddance

[Omestes]

Thats another problem I have with touch typing. I already type a bit faster than I think (and I generally am not typing code). I quickly hash out a paragraph, then sit there idly organizing the next. So basically if I magically added another 20 WPM to my skills, I would just sit there, staring out the window, a bit longer.

When I was growing up, my parents had a friend who took dictation for a living. She could type as fast as you could talk, with a damn fair bit of accuracy, and better she could record a three way conversation in real time, including headers for whose talking. My fourth grade mind was boggled.

Re:Good Riddance

[Just Some Guy]

If you are a touch typist, having to hold a shift key down for more than 2 capital letters in a row really slows down your typing speed and contributes more to repetitive motion injuries.

I'm a touch typist and I don't recall having deliberately typed an all-caps word in decades. If you really need it, then ask your editor to do it (select a region, M-x upcase-region).

Re:Good Riddance

[Subjective]

Yes. In the Google keyboard, there's no button next to 'a'. Just a black, lifeless void

Re:Good Riddance

[stewbacca]

Defense contractor tech writer here--every third word is an acronym, and all system inputs are required to be typed in all caps. Try typing phrases like, "PRESS THE ENTER KEY" without a caps lock key for 8 hours a day.

Re:Good Riddance

[Cimexus]

IMO they should implement caps lock as a soft toggle at the OS level. For instance by holding down shift for a second or two (or double tapping it, ala iOS), it would toggle allcaps on and off.

I agree that there is an occasional need for caps lock - but its rarer than something that deserves its own large, prominently-placed dedicated key on the keyboard, I think.

Re:Good Riddance

[dangitman]

This is even worse -- it means that Caps Lock won't engage when I hit the key normally, even intentionally

Whether you think it's worse or not doesn't really matter. I was simply disproving the claim that the "ancient IBM keyboards" are about the only ones that have protection against accidental caps-lock activation.

It means I can't rely on muscle memory but have to think about what I'm doing -- just to press a key.

But if you got used to the keyboard, you wouldn't have to think about it, so it would be programmed into your muscle memory.

Preventing accidents shouldn't come at the price of impeding correct behavior.

What makes your behavior "correct"? That's like saying countries where people drive on a different side of the road are wrong. It's not wrong, it's just different.

And delay-sensitive interfaces inherently invite errors.

[citation needed]

What's "inherent" about delay-sensitive interfaces that they increase errors? They frequently avoid errors. For example, power-off buttons that you need to hold down for a few seconds avoid accidental loss of data by bumping the power switch. Sensors of various different types avoid errors by not responding to minor activations.

Also, I've seen far more errors caused by accidentally engaging caps-lock than accidentally not engaging it.

Re:Good Riddance

[aaaantoine]

I DISAGREE IN REGARDS TO SLOWER TYPING. HOLDING DOWN SHIFT KEY JUST PUTS MY LEFT PINKY OUT OF COMMISSION, AND THE LOAD IS PICKED UP BY MY LEFT RING FINGER.

The above short paragraph took me as little time to type out as it would have if I weren't holding shift. The most annoying part about it was remembering to release shift when I wanted to use punctuation. If you're an experienced touch typist, holding shift key for extended periods should be trivial (and furthermore, having to type in all caps shouldn't be necessary in the first place).

Re:Good Riddance

[stewbacca]

Sorry, but if you type roughly 90-100 wpm using touch typing in the classic sense, you don't just replace a pinky key with a ring finger key, because it's otherwise occupied by the shift key.

Holding the shift key down for more than the single instance you need it slows you down. Not to the point of major crisis, mind you, just an annoyance and minor physical discomfort.

OMG

[scubamage]

So this means no more cruise control for cool???????

Re:OMG

[ezzzD55J]

itym awesome.

Re:OMG

[rubycodez]

if you're really cool you'd be working forums and irc through your bots, which can transform your words to all caps-awesome and leet lettered

Re:OMG

[scubamage]

So... you're suggesting manual transmission for cool...?

Re:OMG

[Jaxoreth]

So... you're suggesting manual transmission for cool...?

My car has manual transmission and cruise control. The two are orthogonal.

Choice

[magloca]

taking away choice from people is not good

But it sure can be wildly successful. See: iPhone, iPad.

Re:Choice

[Duradin]

Can you still buy netbooks with capslock? Yes? Then you still have choice.

For people complaining about companies taking away choice you sure are eager to take away their choice in matters.

Re:Choice

[John Hasler]

> Can you still buy netbooks with capslock? Yes? Then you still have choice.

In fact, you have more choice.

Re:Choice

[Kilrah_il]

Not to mentions that this is only the prototype beta notebook. I don't think the specification for the final Chrome OS notebook calls for no Caps Lock. I am sure it will be left for the manufacturer's discretion.

Re:Choice

[DragonWriter]

Can you still buy netbooks with capslock? Yes?

Including all Chrome OS netbooks, which support Caps Lock functionality, though the default setting is for the key in the position traditionally used for Caps Lock to serve as a Search quick key.

There is a simple setting, though, to change it to serve as a Caps Lock key.

So, not only do you have the choice to buy or not buy a Chrome OS netbook, if you do choose Chrome OS, you have the choice to have or not have a Caps Lock key.

WHEN YOU PRY IT...

[Anonymous Coward]

...FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS (which are consequently not cramped from having to hold down shift while typing)!!1!

It's a start but

[NiteShaed]

"According to Google, this will improve the quality of the comments"

They should probably take away all the other keys too.......

Re:It's a start but

[IBBoard]

And the computer, in case they start using the mouse and an on-screen keyboard, or even touch-screen, or handwriting recognition.

Re:It's a start but

[entotre]

The removal of any key would not improve the quality of that comment.

Re:It's a start but

[Lordpidey]

Dude, they already removed the any key YEARS ago, I couldn't find it when I needed to install DOS.

Re:It's a start but

[Arancaytar]

That didn't work on the Apple fanboys either. :-P

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[Carthag]

It's more satisfying to hold down shift as you yell. Try it.

Re:By Accident

[s7uar7]

Entering license keys is just about the only time I use it.

Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a database programmer, and I use caps lock on a regular basis. It's off by default, of course, but if I had to type stuff like this all day without caps lock I'd go mad:

CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW part_glass_part2 AS
        SELECT part_key, sum(line_sqft) AS sum_sqft, sum(line_lbs) AS sum_lbs
        FROM part_glass_part1
        GROUP BY 1;

Re:Agreed

[Buggz]

I've actually become quite proficient at writing quite fast while having my (left) pinky holding the shift-key down. I do a slight bit of SQL myself once in a while, and I'm more comfortable holding the shift-key down for the keywords instead of turning caps on and off.

Arguably though, I might've had more of an issue with it had SQL been my primary area of expertise. Our main database developer doesn't even use the shift-key. Ever.

Re:Agreed

[mcvos]

I don't do a lot of database work, but when I do, I'm glad I can write my queries in lowercase. Looks much better that way.

Re:Agreed

[Kilrah_il]

OTOH, database programmers aren't the intended target audience of Chrome OS. Just sayin'

Re:Agreed

[marcosdumay]

# ifdef SOME_MACRO_NAME_THAT_WILL_BE_CREATED_BY_A_SCRIPT_SOEWHERE .......
#endif
#ifdef SOME_OTHER_MACRO_THAT_THE_SCRIPT_CREATES ........
#endif
#ifdef AGAIN_SOME_OBSCURE_MACRO_CREATED_BY_SOFTWARE ......
#endif

Now, get me some software that auto cases C!

Re:Agreed

[meloneg]

Um, SQL isn't case-sensitive. That's just a coding convention.

Re:Agreed

[camperdave]

It's a real shame that you can't just plug a regular USB keyboard into this thing.

Re:Agreed

[starsky51]

I do a fair bit of SQL scripting in my day job and my right-hand pinkie works fine.
I know programmers traditionally like to preserve their energy for building up their fat stores, but you can spare a tiny bit.

Re:Agreed

[commodore64_love]

>>>CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW part_glass_part2 AS SELECT

EXACTLY.

Precisely. For the google dipshit to say, "I never use it, so it can go to hell," demonstrates they must have fired all their programmers & engineers. The key was invented almost a century ago for typewriters because it was needed, and for google to not include the key is short-sighted.

C64_love (still looking for a new search engine that's not Google)

Re:Agreed

[S.O.B.]

Actually, auto-casing teaches that syntax is not as important as accomplishing the task at hand quickly and efficiently.

Re:Agreed

[ZankerH]

It's a netbook, and it's basically a locked-down Linux OS with Chrome on top. I'm pretty sure it supports usb keyboards.

Re:Agreed

[rubycodez]

it's a *required* coding convention by company policy every place I've worked, the SQL reserved words are capitalized

Re:Agreed

[icebraining]

No, it demonstrates that they don't plan to sell it to programmers and engineers. It's an OS designed for running only web apps, will people really be typing SQL in it so regularly they need caps lock?

Re:Agreed

[UNFAIRMAN]

Remember this is a consumption device that can be used for the occasional tweet or post, not a programmer's device.

They made a good start by zapping the PrintScreen/ScrollLock/Pause/NumLock/Insert/CapsLock buttons. But there is so much more to be done in creating the perfect consumption netbook keyboard.

They made the up/down buttons too small and took away many of the nav keys (PgUp, PgDn, Home, End). This is a big deal. I'm actually not suggesting they return these keys but perhaps re-invent the keyboard navigation. I'd love to see a variable rocker switch embedded in the keyboard with scroll wheel functionality where a single tap is a one-line move and a strong press is equivalent to a PgUp/PgDn keystroke. I'm not an HCI expert but a new human-centric keyboard navigation paradigm is needed.

Also: Take away the programmer's keyboard keys - back-quote, square braces, and backslash keys - and move them to Alt- keystrokes (back quote on the quotes key, backslash on the /? key, pipe on the ;: key, square braces on the ,lt.gt keys, curly braces on the 9(0) keys, tilda on the 6^ key) This way they are still there but not taking up valuable real estate.

The one mistake in my mind is zapping the Delete key. I can't write a post without both backspace and delete keys.

The last big change they should have made is putting in "B"old and "i"talic keys, putting them in place of the CapsLock key. It would be fairly easy to support them in all Google's sites (just put support into their various frameworks) and the rest of the world would follow soon enough. Although this is my preference I can see why they chose a "Search" button, after all this is a search company.

As for focusing on CapsLock, this is an non-issue as the double tap Shift functionality is already well established in the Google ecosystem, but I do appreciate the way it has gotten everyone thinking about how to evolve the old keyboard again.

Re:Agreed

[mbourgon]

SQLPrompt

Re:Agreed

[LWATCDR]

Actually it was needed because 100 years ago we had manual typewriters and it to took a lot of effort to hold down the shift.
We kept it because for some reason people wanted some forms to have fields in all upper case.
Now with computers it takes very little effort to hold down the shift key and if a field needs to be in all upper the software should do it for you.
For people that want to use it in data base work well I just hold down the shift but that is just me. but being a programmer I can see other options.
An all caps mode that you go into by double tapping the shift key and you get out by tapping the shift key? It would free up the space and give you the same functionality. The one exception is for those that really tick me off and when they are in all caps they put the c in McDONALD in lower case!

Re:Agreed

[dr2chase]

Seems like the capitalization of keywords could be automated. Seriously "let's write a style checker, to reject code with lower case keywords", versus, "let's write a filter to ensure that keywards are in upper case". One is whack-on-the-knuckles with a ruler, the other is a productivity aid.

(I hope they don't enforce this rule by human inspection, but I have this horrible fear...)

Re:Agreed

[rubycodez]

sure it could be automated, just like the capitalization of macros, constants, global vars, etc. but coders can do it with theirs brains and fingers easily, not a priority to write such a thing.

Re:Agreed

[gnapster]

Or maybe the next addition to the Google Apps family will be Google IDE, for programming in the cloud.

Re:Agreed

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

It's interesting , the different habits we can develop - when doing such tasks as that, I dedicate my pinky to holding down the Shift key and compensate with my ring finger.

Re:Agreed

[Carrot007]

I detect a lack of viewpoint either way in your comment so I shall assume you mean that in the way i would.

Re:Agreed

[killmenow]

C64_love (still looking for a new search engine that's not Google)

https://ixquick.com/

Re:Agreed

[EvilBudMan]

So

Re:Agreed

[BluePeppers]

Day I learnt this was the greatest day.

Re:Agreed

[Boomerang Fish]

Yes, but a useful one... I can't count the number of times I've edited someone's code to capitalize the SQL commands so that the fields and where clauses are more easily picked out of a complex query.

Not saying you're wrong, just that some conventions exist for a reason... and removing the caps-lock simply because some users miss-use it seems more like cutting off an arm because the fingers constantly flick you off...

--
I drank what?

Re:Agreed

[interval1066]

I assume you realize you don't really need to use upper case in those db commands. I'm not aware of a db interpreter that demands case as part of its syntax. Its just a stupid convention that's been around since the days of caseless ttys and main frame data bases (remember DB/2?). Your stuck in a little bit of a rut. That said, I don't agree with taking away choice either. Still, I'm a little annoyed by your comment. Gotta have case in sql, huh??? sure...

Re:Agreed

[meloneg]

Get a better editor. Or bookmark this: http://www.dpriver.com/pp/sqlformat.htm

Re:Agreed

[ADRA]

That would be cool, but it should be in the IDE instead considering that the item is in caps to signify a reserved word. If it was only changed at check-in, it would miss the whole point of having the item capitalized to begin with which is to make sure the developer of the code isn't accidentally typing reserved words into parts of the SQL that it isn't valid, or simply that the reserved word in the wrong spot is valid but changes the behavior from what the coder intended.

Re:Agreed

[Buelldozer]

This sounds like a real problem for you. I'd recommend that you not get a Chrome Netbook for database programming.

Re:Agreed

[reynolds_john]

Not sure what you're doing your sql in, but may I suggest a few options?

* Intellisense in SSMS is rather good, and can be set to upper case statements.
* RedGate SQL Prompt or SQL Refractor are life savers.
* SQLInForm http://www.sqlinform.com/

Just to name a few.

Re:Agreed

[S.O.B.]

Sorry, in my attempt to be clever I was unintentionally vague. That'll teach me.

I was responding to the AC, who seemed to imply that code editors that eliminated the need to pay attention to the minutia of syntax created bad or lazy coders.

My point was that automating the details of the coding allows more focus on the work and speeds up the "edit/save/compile/curse syntax error" development cycle of ye olde days. Or even worse, the "punch program on cards/wait for available card reader/scan cards/curse card out of order" development cycle of ye really olde days (I still have nightmares).

Re:Agreed

[S.O.B.]

My comment should be taken in the context of the post I was responding to.

To clarify my statement read my response to Carrot007 above.

Re:Agreed

[shutdown -p now]

Your link is about collations - what is used to sort data in ORDER BY queries. It has absolutely nothing to do with case sensitivity of SQL keywords and identifiers.

I have not seen any SQL implementation with case-sensitive keywords so far. They are certainly not that in MSSQL. For identifiers, it's more problematic - quoted ones ("foo") are always case sensitive, but unquoted ones (foo) are handled differently. The standard says that foo should mean the same as "FOO", and that's what MSSQL does, but e.g. PostgreSQL deviates from that, lowercasing instead of uppercasing.

Re:Agreed

[GuldKalle]

Could a key-combo satify you? Like caps+C or double-clicking shift or something?

Re:Agreed

[blueg3]

Actually, if you're #ifdef'ing macros that are reasonably visible, Xcode will do properly-capitalized autocomplete on them.

Re:Agreed

[blueg3]

At least, they don't plan to sell it to (many) programmers who also are unable to make their own Caps Lock key.

Re:Agreed

[cbhacking]

Also, while "SQL" in general does not require case-sensitivity, some dialects of it might. No two database engines seem to use exactly the same variant of SQL, and I seem to recall that at least one of them was actually case sensitive.

Re:Agreed

[StormShaman]

Why is this a convention? I know all languages used to do this, but in most cases their descendents have left it behind. I prefer syntax-highlighted, lowercase words. I find them easier to read.

Re:Agreed

[rubycodez]

you must be joking, I can type multiple lines of code in mixed case in the time it takes to cut and paste to such a "tool". My brain and fingers work just dandily, thanks.

Re:Agreed

[ldierk]

I dont use caps lock. not even for line long names of constants. I don't think I ever used it.

I love the caps lock key

[david.given]

...I couldn't use Emacs or shell editing without it. Beats me why it's labelled 'caps lock', though --- the other control keys on the keyboard are all labelled 'Ctrl'.

Re:I love the caps lock key

[zoidran]

I use it as well, but as the compose key (and not control). Its location is simply great. Physically removing it is definitely a bad idea.

Re:I love the caps lock key

[denaje]

...I couldn't use Emacs or shell editing without it. Beats me why it's labelled 'caps lock', though --- the other control keys on the keyboard are all labelled 'Ctrl'.

I love it too...Backspace is MUCH too far for my right pinky to reach. So much less strain on my fingers when I only have to reach over to Caps Lock with my left pinky to delete some incorrect letters.

Re:I love the caps lock key

[archen]

If you look at the picture in the article, there is still another key in its place. How hard it will be to remap remains to be seen of course.

Re:I love the caps lock key

[EvanED]

I was gonna say the same thing. I saw the light when I was in undergrad and used a old Sun keyboard on one of their Unix boxes, and have sometimes remapped caps ever since. (Sometimes I'm too lazy, mostly on Windows because it's not completely trivial there.)

Their backspace key placement was stupid stupid stupid though and more than made up for the caps lock placement in terms of making the keyboard stupid. I actually had ` mapped to delete-backwards-char or whatever Emacs calls it.

Re:I love the caps lock key

[gnapster]

And deciding whether you want to remap it from the search function may be even harder.

Re:I love the caps lock key

[bluej100]

That's a great idea! Mine is already taken for Esc for vim, though.

Re:I love the caps lock key

[denaje]

Ctrl-C functions as Esc for many of Vim's functions, though it isn't perfect for all situations. So I put imap ^C ^[ into my .vimrc (^[ being, of course, the secret identity of the Esc key), which fixes things up.

Re:I love the caps lock key

[Dast]

AMEN BROTHER

(upcase-region 1 (buffer-end 1))^X^E

^X^C

Re:I love the caps lock key

[ZirconCode]

And here I thought it was an Esc key.... / hysteria follows

Re:I love the caps lock key

[martas]

i don't get it...

Re:By Accident

[Anonymous Coward]

Not until I remapped it to be a compose key. Now I can easily type in all sorts of characters.

As a way to lock in annoying text, though, no; I have not ever used it for that.

Buncha keys should go

[dazedNconfuzed]

Why the continuing bother with Caps Lock, SysRq, Scroll Lock, and Break? Does anyone use them? at least, any number of people above statistical noise?
How about the Windows and Menu keys? anybody use that on a regular basis? would a statistically meaningful number miss them?
And while we're at it, usage of the Function keys (12 of them!) seems vanishingly small.
Nineteen nigh-unto-unused keys, times how many keyboards out there with them?

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Sonny Yatsen]

I think the only people who still use all these keys are people who like overly complex video games that uses every single key on your keyboard, plus all the buttons on your mouse, plus some sort of neural interface to get working.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[gstoddart]

Why the continuing bother with Caps Lock, SysRq, Scroll Lock, and Break? Does anyone use them?

If you're doing any significant data entry, both caps lock and num lock get used quite a bit. Most keyboards have the SysRq key on the same key as the Print Screen, which gets used all of the time.

I used to have to use scroll-lock back in the old tty days before we had scrollbars, but honestly I've not used it in a long time. Same thing for Pause/Break, but I bet there are people who use mainframe terminal software that still need them.

Function keys used to be integral to a lot of software, and you'd actually get templates that went over the keyboard -- I haven't seen any in a long time. But things like Wordperfect and specialized software made crazy use of them.

The problem is, there are a lot of very good, historical reasons why those keys are there in the first place, and just because you don't use them, doesn't mean they're not in widespread usage. Removing them could leave your keyboard as essentially useless for many things.

I am of the opinion that changing the keyboard layout just because you can is a horrible idea. Having seen Sun keyboards over the years which randomly move around keys, or even modern HP keyboards which are bordering on insane -- leave the damn 101-key layout in place, and don't fsck with it.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[GIL_Dude]

I'm sure I am the "statistical noise" the GP mentioned but here are some I use daily (I work in IT, I have a "different" job in that I both code and create system images):

Scroll Lock - KVM "switch machines" key - used all day
F12 - PXE boot - used a lot
F1, F2, F10, F9 - Different machines use this for BIOS access - used some
Windows Key - used to access instant search on the start menu in Windows - used a lot


For the folks who mention "just hold down shift if you need to type a lot of caps" - if you do this the machine will often ask if you want to turn on "Sticky Keys" (yes, this can be disabled).

Re:Buncha keys should go

[BenFenner]

I uses Break when working with Windows in Recovery Console and similar command interfaces (unless I'm confusing Break with Pause, in which case I don't use them).
The Windows keys (for a Windows power user) are invaluable. Dozens of useful shortcuts use them. Windows+D toggles to the desktop (hiding all windows) and back. Windows +M minimizes all windows. Windows+L locks the OS. I use them every day. Also the Windows key is sometimes the only way to get the Start Menu to appear if the system is hanging or some full screen app is being too greedy.
The menu keys? I'm not sure what you're referring to there. However the key between the right Ctrl and the right Windows key on most keyboards is a type of menu key. It has the same purpose and performs the same task as right clicking the mouse. I use it all the time when I'm in the mood to go keyboard only. I don't think there's a single thing I need the mouse for when I'm not in the mood to use it, and that's mostly due to that one key.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Sonny Yatsen]

Holding down shift doesn't turn on Sticky Keys. Pressing it 5 times in quick succession does.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[91degrees]

Scroll Lock - KVM "switch machines" key - used all day

I think the fact that this can be used by a KVM with no effect on any other application illustrates how useless the key normally is.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[gman003]

The "Win" key is actually pretty heavily used. Win+L to lock the screen, Win+D to minimize all windows, Win+R to open the "Run" prompt, Win+E to open Explorer, etc. I even set up my Linux and BSD boxen to use the same keys, plus more - Win+S to shade a window, Win+X to close a window, etc. If you can get used to key shortcuts, you can get pretty fast with it.

If I was removing keys, I would get rid of the whole PrtScrn/SysReq, Scroll Lock and Pause/Break keys. Maybe ditch the menu key. Num Lock might be another candidate for removal - on keyboards with both number keys and arrow keys, it's a bit redundant.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[barnackle]

I use the Caps Lock at work all the time when I'm drawing plans because some clients have CAD standards in which all letters are supposed to be capitalized. This can be paragraphs in some cases. And for certain headings in spreadsheets and such, I'd rather toggle Caps Lock and type quickly than hold shift as I type.

I need Caps Lock for "note off" in Renoise, a music tracker program that, designed to be operated almost exclusively from the keyboard, makes good use of all the keys. (I could remap it, of course, but I like to keep it standard so I can move around easily.) Renoise uses the Scroll Lock and function keys as well.

How about if Google just deletes any comments written in all caps.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[gman003]

They actually make games like that? I've never seen a game that uses even all the alpha keys. It's a rare game that uses a key to the right of the 'H', even. I'd say 50% of games just use WSADEFRQ, Ctrl, Shift, Space, and maybe TG.

Remember, most games are designed for the XBox or PS3, which are limited in buttons much more than the PC. Since controls like R+Z+DUp (actually used that) are needlessly difficult, they just limit features to "what can be done on a controller", often by making some commands context-sensitive - the "open door" button can also serve as the "talk to NPC" button without confusion, for example.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[camperdave]

You're in luck!

It also will not have caps locks or function keys, hard drives, or spinning discs.

How they expect us to switch to switch to a terminal without pressing <CTRL><ALT><F1> is quite beyond me.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Jimmy King]

I'm probably statistical noise here, much like one of the other commenters.

I use the windows key all the time. windows key -> r -> cmd -> enter in xp and win2k/2k3/etc. I also use it to bring up the search thing in win7. I almost always use the windows key to pull up my start menu even when using the mouse for the rest of the process, too. It's measurably quicker and smoother for me for some reason.

I also use my function keys for switching between terminals on a linux box/connected to the terminal of a linux VM in VMWare far more often than you'd expect.

I also use ctrl-f5 pretty regularly.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[nschubach]

Holding shift will bring up the dialog for accessibility along with a little tone.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[vilemike]

Caps Lock: Used for key-activated voice communication;
SysRq: Tied to PRTSC, if it ain't broken, don't fix it;
Scroll Lock: X-Fire uses it by default, and it's a great key to use when you need to bind a menu or overlay to something out of the way;
Pause/Break: I use the command prompt and command-line programs a lot. This key is the coolest thing ever.
Windows Key: Win+D all day long, Win+E very often, Win+R like it's a candy dispenser;
Menu Key: Incredibly useful when you can only use one hand to control your computer (especially if it happens to be your keyboard hand)
Function Keys: F1 for documentation, F2 to change names, F3 to pause, Alt+F4 for magic, F5 to refresh slashdot every 3 seconds, F6 to access the URL bar, F 7 when you're too lazy to use your mouse (or can only use your keyboard hand), FN+F8 to toggle wireless on my laptop, F9 to start recording with fraps, F10 to stop, F11 to take a screenshot with fraps, F12 is useful in a handful of apps;

So yeah, even if you're not using these keys yourself, they're very useful to anyone who actually uses their computers for more than browsing facebook.
Start coding anything with more than a few input commands and you'll actually be wanting extra keys :)

Re:Buncha keys should go

[HeckRuler]

Nethack, and a lot of the rogue-likes use every key they can get their hands onto
also, X-pilot

Re:Buncha keys should go

[jrumney]

Most keyboards have the SysRq key on the same key as the Print Screen, which gets used all of the time. [citation needed]

I know in Windows the PrintScreen key puts a snapshot of the screen on the clipboard, but there are plenty of better ways to get a snapshot, so I can't say I've used it more than 2 or 3 times since 1995.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[vlm]

Why the continuing bother with Caps Lock, SysRq, Scroll Lock, and Break? Does anyone use them?

sysRq aka "print screen" used constantly at work.

Easily half the emails I get have something "alt-prtscrn" then "control-V" into the email. Bonus points if they copy-paste into a "paint" program and draw their comments all over it.

Almost all bug reports, anything even tangentially relating to CAD blueprints, basically anything thats not just plain ole text that is under discussion.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[VortexCortex]

Why the continuing bother with Caps Lock, SysRq, Scroll Lock, and Break? Does anyone use them? at least, any number of people above statistical noise?

Yes, I do use them all.

Ctrl+Break = break out of a console program or script (interrupt signal).

Pause = Stop the initial BIOS startup text from disappearing from view before I've had a chance to read it.

Caps Lock = Type a $CONSTANT_VARIABLE_NAME without having to hold down shift.

PrintScreen = On Windows, or KDE4: copies a screenshot to the clipboard; on Gnome take a screenshot and opens the "Save Screenshot" dialog.

SysReq = Recover from freezes, reboot without trashing the filesystem, etc Instead of rebooting on Linux, next time try entering the following sequence of keys with Alt+SysReq held down: R E I S U B (allow a few seconds between each letter). American Simplified (Dvorak) users: P . C O G X. see link for key meanings

Scroll Lock = Change computers that my Keyboard/Video/Mouse Switch is displaying/controlling (when Pressed 3 times in succession) or toggle between scrolling the entire page or moving the cursor (I hear Excel supports the latter behavior as well).

Just because you are not a "power user" or a programmer doesn't mean that those who are make up a percentage below "statistical noise" ratio. Also: Just because you don't use these keys, doesn't mean the person who is diagnosing or fixing your computer problem doesn't need the keys.

The Chrome notebook will be solely for web applications. My most recently crafted web application is a secure remote terminal (SSH client) using JavaScript and HTML5 (web sockets). I will not purchase the device if I am lacking any of the above keys or caps lock (I use caps lock for naming $CONSTANTS and typing acronyms like "SCOTUS").

Note: ChromeOS's web-apps aren't like plugins... I hope there is a ChromeOS plugin framework. My first ChromeOS plugin will be to emulate a caps lock switch via pressing shift twice in rapid succession, or both shifts at once (provided that Google sticks with their U KANT HAS CAPS policy...

On another note: Seriously Google? You folks are CODERS. You can DETECT all-caps posts and convert them to lowercase. Hell, some languages (like Perl or C++) have a simple "lc" or "tolower" function. You could even provide a little "aA" button next to such converted posts that allows you to view the original content... Removing the Caps key is fucking stupid. One of your hardware designers has too much time on their hands and should be fired (they obviously can't code to save their life).

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Tranzistors]

Function keys – sortcuts, most popular – F11 (full screen). Option to customize helps productivity a lot.
Caps Lock – I have noticed that some use it as a sticky key for writing capital letters, while writing normal sentences.
Break – BIOS info reading.
Windows (super) key – on compiz it is widely used, also helps making shortcuts.
Menu key – when using keyboard to manipulate text or whatnot, context menu is much easier to call using this key.
So, just because YOU don't use it, doesn't mean that others don't.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[VortexCortex]

Or, hmm, I dunno, programmers?

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Ephemeriis]

Why the continuing bother with Caps Lock, SysRq, Scroll Lock, and Break? Does anyone use them? at least, any number of people above statistical noise?
How about the Windows and Menu keys? anybody use that on a regular basis? would a statistically meaningful number miss them?
And while we're at it, usage of the Function keys (12 of them!) seems vanishingly small.
Nineteen nigh-unto-unused keys, times how many keyboards out there with them?

I use the windows key all the time. WINKEY+R to get a run prompt... WINKEY+L to lock my computer before I walk away... WINKEY+E to bring up an explorer window... WINKEY+BREAK to bring up computer properties... WINKEY+M to minimize everything... Very handy.

I have to use CAPS LOCK for our EMR software. Everything needs to be in capitals.

Break is handy for the above-mentioned WINKEY+BREAK, but that's about the only time I touch it.

SYSRQ and Scroll Lock are frequently used by KVMs. I always forget which of our KVMs uses which key... But I'm constantly mashing those two to switch between machines.

F1 is pretty reliably mapped to "help" of some kind, so I use that key fairly often. The remaining function keys get used fairly often in the video games I play. Maybe to select a weapon... Or save/load... Or whatever.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[gstoddart]

I know in Windows the PrintScreen key puts a snapshot of the screen on the clipboard, but there are plenty of better ways to get a snapshot, so I can't say I've used it more than 2 or 3 times since 1995.

Wow, you're lucky. I've used it to write documentation, file bug reports, all sorts of things.

I do sometimes use a screen capture tool when it's available, but if you're on a locked-down server trying to collect information to send to a vendor for a support ticket, Print Screen is often the only way you can do this.

I've probably used the Print Screen several thousand times since 1995.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[rubycodez]

The function keys do all kinds of useful things on a laptop, and for those of us on Linux or BSD is great for switching out of X11 and going between multiple consoles. The function keys are used by a huge number of financial, insurance and manufacturing companies that have to use legacy software via terminal emulation. scroll-lock and print-scrn/sysrq are used by some kvm consoles to switch machines When I'm on windows, Windows key and L, to lock the station Windows developers and people who have to run windows batch files use the control-break to send SIGBREAK, different than a control-c (SIGINT), usually more effective.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[MrLizardo]

I'll add to this from the Linux side. I love that keyboards have a windows key. It basically means that in linux I have another key down by ctrl and alt that I can use for custom keybindings without having to worry about overlapping with the keybindings in some application. Also Alt+SysRq is very helpful for kernel debugging. I'd actually be happy to lose dedicated PgDn, PgUp, Home, and End keys and have those be typed by pressing an Fn key along with the cursor keys. In short, an Apple Macbook keyboard with the Eject key mapped to SysRq sounds perfect to me.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Jeremy Erwin]

I wouldn't be that surprised if nethack had hooks for a space cadet keyboard.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[siride]

It's never done that for me. I never use capslock, but I do plenty of SQL. So I'm holding down shift all the time, often without really thinking about it. Not once has any dialog popped up.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[snspdaarf]

Anyone working on AS400 machines needs function keys in green screen stuff. Also, switching virtual consoles in linux.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[CAIMLAS]

I'd have to agree - of the keys that need to go, Capslock is certainly the last. It has common-day functionality for many people.

Scroll lock, Break, and SysRq are useful, just not to the vast majority of people. Most people wouldn't miss them on a regular basis. They are, however, often re-programmed on point-of-sale systems for special functionality within the programs and the like.

F keys are used by a great number of applications. "Professionals" will rebind these within the applications, quite often. (My brother is an animator and does this, as does my father in Office and AutoCAD.) It saves a lot of time for routine tasks.

Doing away with 'standard' keyboard layouts would be a mistake. There are too many things which expect them, and it's what give "PCs" their power and cross-utility.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[whereiswaldo]

Keys that "nobody uses" are great for command sequences for KVMs, virtual machines, desktop environments, etc...

On the CAPS LOCK key, I sometimes use it when entering 'constant' identifiers into source code where the convention is to use all uppercase letters. eg. PI_CONST = 3.1415
Though I've gotten pretty good at entering all uppercase letters with just the SHIFT keys (and I suspect the same will happen to others if the CAPS LOCK is taken away from those who shout in their online posts).

Re:Buncha keys should go

[ChefInnocent]

I know there are minimalist fans out there, and people who hate old keys, but I use every key on my keyboard. It already galls me to no end that I can't find an ergonomic wireless keyboard that hasn't made my function keys into some damned media key. Now I have to try and hit the damned f-lock key in just a few milliseconds as I try to get into the BIOS on start up, or I'm hitting keys wondering why they aren't working because I didn't hit the damned f-lock. Just because you don't use those keys doesn't mean they should be taken away from me.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Jake Griffin]

Yeah, but is it if you hold down shift while typing too, or only if you hold down shift and do nothing for those few seconds... Most people will find the key they want within that amount of time...

Re:Buncha keys should go

[slashdottedjoe]

I wish websites would use the function keys. That is the one thing I miss most with web apps, few hot-keys. Anybody who uses a word processor routinely knows the benefits of having special keys to go directly to an option. Web apps are mouse based and ,though functional, leave out certain keyboard options that would make them far more useful.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Jake Griffin]

THANK YOU (used shift to type that, even without thinking of it... I never use caps lock for typing in all caps)... I was hoping at least one person would mention this. I use AutoHotKey at work and have many of the "useless" keys mapped to some of my scripts. For example, I use the windows key in combination with a letter (e.g. Windows + C opens "C:" in an Explorer window, Windows + Space opens Perforce, Eclipse, and Firefox, all of which I have open while developing at my job). That way, I don't interfere with built in shortcuts (I avoid useful Windows key shortcuts like Windows+R and Windows+E). Also, I have the Caps Lock key overridden to reload my autohotkey script whenever I make little changes to it, so I couldn't use it for caps if I even tried. So yea, I'm all for removing the "All Caps" functionality, but I don't want to lose a useful key on my keyboard (even if I have to manually map what I want it to do).

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Omestes]

I hate that feature, the it did lead to me learning an annoying habit I have. Apparently when I'm typing, and hit a blank, I will sit and idly tap right-shift with my pinkie until my brain can process the next sentence. At some point Windows kept popping up an accessibility panel advertising "sticky keys". Obnoxious, when did they do this? Vista? It might be the dumbest way to advertise a feature, "lets hide it behind an obscure and completely undocumented number of key-presses on a specific key! Thats the first place people wanting this feature will look! Completely intuitive!"

Re:Buncha keys should go

[atisss]

Yes, some people even use Insert and Delete above arrows, however stupid keyboard makers have figured out that they aren't necessary there.. So it's hard to buy top quality keyboard with useful arrangement.

However it could be configured in OS to disable the key by default

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Buelldozer]

If you can't name at least one application that uses F1-F22 then please turn in your geek card.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[DMUTPeregrine]

That, and almost every game uses PrintScn to save a screenshot by default.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[scot4875]

Holding down any (control?) key will bring up the accessibility dialog, but not if you type other keys while holding down the first.

--Jeremy

Re:Buncha keys should go

[nschubach]

It's 8 seconds of holding the right shift with nothing else for the Filterkey popup and hitting the left shift 5 times for Stickykey.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[rjstanford]

Yes, I do use them all.

Ctrl+Break = break out of a console program or script (interrupt signal).

Pause = Stop the initial BIOS startup text from disappearing from view before I've had a chance to read it.

...

You have to be kidding, right? How often do you have to STOP THE BIOS STARTUP TEXT (note: all caps accomplished through the cunning use of the SHIFT key) that you need a dedicated key for this? By definition its no more than once per boot cycle. And since this is a new piece of hardware with a new OS, presumably there'd be another way to accomplish this, no?

To generate an interrupt signal, most shells use CTRL-C anyway. Your other comments are equally either unlikely or very, very niche-oriented (KVM switch? Whatever, this is a laptop keyboard! How many laptop keyboards go through a KVM before seeing their server). If you can't see that...

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Jake Griffin]

Right, so if someone were to "just hold down shift if you need to type a lot of caps" they would never see this unless they waited 8 seconds after first pressing shift to type the first character (holding it for 8 seconds AFTER the first character actually doesn't activate it). So this would be fine.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Mryll]

I love threads like this because I know there will be at least a half-dozen shortcuts suggested by others of which I was blissfully unaware. :)

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Cederic]

Only if you hold it down while not actually typing letters.

If you only hold down shift while typing you're fine.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[DigitAl56K]

I use Break very frequently. Win+Break brings up the system control panel, Ctrl+Break breaks some programs, cancels builds, cancels find-in-files, etc. I have seen keyboards without the break key and I actually find it quite infuriating because quick access to the system control panel is something I like.

The Windows key is extremely functional - Win+R lets you run a program, tap Win and start typing the name of a shortcut or indexed file in Windows 7 and it'll find it and let you launch it nearly instantly.

Just because you don't use them doesn't mean other people don't. Not everyone uses their computer for the same things you do. Don't want people to post comments in all caps? (Even though it sounds like a joke, didn't read tfa): Detect if the comment is written in all-caps and reject or reformat it.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[jamiedolan]

How about the Windows and Menu keys? anybody use that on a regular basis? would a statistically meaningful number miss them?

I almost never use the menu key, however, I frequently use the windows key. e.g. Windows Key, type name of what I want, Enter.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[VortexCortex]

No, I'm not "kidding". I'm a coder who also frequently constructs & repairs PCs. I don't see where any of my statements are so unbelievable that they must be jokes. Is it hard for you to believe that I actually do the things I say I do?

Please note: I would not have listed my regular uses of those keys if I did not use them regularly.

Pause/break a combo key, and is not is not only used to pause the BIOS display it pauses other displays as well, however I repair & refurbish PCs so I do use the key for that purpose frequently.

You can bet your bottom dollar that there will not be a secondary option (other than the pause key) on Google's new hardware to pause any BIOS text -- The diag info will probably be silenced by default, as is the standard practice with most every mfg nowdays. If the pause key is missing, an external USB keyboard would be required.

I actually do have my laptop connected to a KVM switch because it has the option of outputting to a secondary display, and I prefer to use only one external keyboard, monitor & mouse to control all of my PCs (and laptop). This is cheaper & less clutter than purchasing several large screens, keyboards & mice. (I use the built in laptop screen when away from home).

Also, I prefer CTRL-Break to Ctrl-C. Ctrl-C is copy in many text editors. Sometimes I forget to hold shift along with ctrl-c to copy terminal text, therefore I've disabled that ctrl-c interrupt in favor of the dedicated and aptly labeled Break key.

If by niche oriented, you mean non power users won't use the key, then yes, that may be true. However, as a power user who can touch type all of those keys (esp. the insert, home, end, delete, pg up/dn) without a glance, I will not be purchasing a device without those keys available -- I use them way too much.

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Cimexus]

MMOs. I play a few and every freaking key on my keyboard is needed (or if not absolutely 'needed', it is at least very nice to have). Mostly bound to opening up various dialogs and menus and stuff (e.g. inventory, crafting window, chat channels, things related to trade and commerce, quest informaion, maps, group-finding features, skill management etc; not to mention all the actual skills themselves which are usually bound to the numeric keys/function keys + modifiers)...

Re:Buncha keys should go

[Cimexus]

Agreed. I hate that the key is ~called~ the Windows key and that it has a Windows logo on it, but having a modifier key of some description in that spot is good, and does get used a lot. Out of those you mention I use Win+D the most. I do lock my screen regularly too but tend to radpidly go "ctrl-alt-del, Enter" to do that instead.

Win+Pause is a good one too: brings up the System control panel/device manager/etc. Especially if you spend a lot of your time setting up computers or diagnosing issues, this is a real time saver compared to going Control Panel -> System, or right clicking My Computer and picking 'Properties' (all of which do the same thing).

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[suso]

The company I work for during the day actually uses an archaic system with terminal menus and command line commands that are named in all capital letters. They use the caps lock key excessively. I've seen other systems like this in use for inventory systems at stores and warehouses too. You probably have as well.

STUPID

[Anonymous Coward]

DOES GOOGLE NOT HAVE ANY DBA'S WORKING FOR THEM? IF THEY DID, THEY WOULD REALIZE HOW AWESOME THEY ARE AT TYPING WHILE HOLDING THE SHIFT KEY DOWN. KTHXBYE.

in order to bypass the filter, i guess i have to type a lot of undercase words too. perhaps more than i did uppercase. in anycase, i think we get the point.

Re:STUPID

[RingDev]

If you are writing your SQL in all caps....

You're doing it wrong.

-Rick

Re:STUPID

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Ugh, I hate non-caps SQL.

Not for any real reason... it just doesn't look like SQL.

Re:STUPID

[RingDev]

Personal preference, but I usually write keywords in caps, objects in proper.

For instance:

    SELECT t1.Field1, t1.Field2
      FROM Table1 t1
INNER JOIN Table2 t2
        ON t1.Field1 = t2.Field1
       AND t2.Field2 = t2.Field2
     WHERE t2.Field3 = 'Some Value'

IMO, it's much more readable than just upper casing the whole thing.

Re:STUPID

[nschubach]

I still put SQL commands in caps, but I hold down Shift for them. I rarely ever use caps lock. Can't think of the last time I did actually.

Re:STUPID

[mikestew]

The editor doesn't auto-cap them for you? I programmed in FoxPro for years, and convention said keywords were all caps. I don't know that I ever touched the caps lock key; the editor took care of the formatting. I'd be surprised if there weren't a vim plug-in that did this for you.

Re:STUPID

[owlstead]

It's much better readable in plain text, but *why* would you want to read it in plain text? Why not view it using an editor that does the formatting for you. I'm shuddering slightly at looking at those neatly right hand aligned text myself. Very readable, but is it maintainable as well?

Re:STUPID

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Oh yeah, that's what I meant, although I don't like the right-aligned thing, I like:

SELECT
  t1 .field1                           AS mutton,
  t2 .field3                           AS rectally,
  COALESCE(to1.field2, 'Brinkmanship') AS dogma,
  CASE to1.field3
    WHEN 'U' THEN 'Uptown'
    WHEN 'F' THEN 'Frankfurter'
    ELSE          'Han Solo'
  END                                  AS sherpa
  FROM      table1     t1
  JOIN      table2     t2  ON t2 .pkey = t1.fkey_t2
  LEFT JOIN tableOther to1 ON to1.pkey = t1.fkey_to1
  WHERE
    t1 .field3 = 7        AND
    t2 .field2 = 'doggie' AND
    to1.field4 = 'B'      OR to1.field4 IS NULL
;

The above is my attempt to bring semantic tabs and columns together in a beautiful symphony of readability. It's okay if you hate it--everyone does (even though it's perfect!) and I never get to use it at work :(

THEY MAY TAKE

[inerlogic]

OUR CAPSLOCK! BUT THEY'LL NE'ER TAKE OUR FREEDOM!!!!

*this message brought to you by holding Shift on a standard keyboard... i never use c.lock neway

Re:THEY MAY TAKE

[alphatel]

We don't need no caps lock nation. We don't need no caps control. No dark sarcasm in the ChromeOS. Google leave them caps alone.

Re:THEY MAY TAKE

[owlstead]

Nicely said, but they seem to have already taken your 'V' key behind your back.

No big deal

[Matt_Bennett]

Heck, I've edited the registry on my windows machines to disable the key anyway. Only gets me into trouble. Be nice to map it into something else. Definitely not a key that has much use anyway.

SUBJECT

[Notlupus]

Man Google keeps pulling shit like this. Everytime they make a new 'user interface enhancing web 2.0 nonsense addition' the support forums are flooded with people complaining that they can't get their old look back. And Google just doesn't give a crap. Not planning to get a Chrome laptop so this hardly affects me, but changing stuff without offering a way to keep it in the old state is just a dick move.

Damn orange button!

[dxprog]

How am I supposed to program BASIC on this thing? My poor pinky will get all tired...

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[IBBoard]

Caps lock: Yep, it gets used for long blocks of capitalised text (particularly those in SQL statements and those that also mix in numbers so that the 3 doesn't become £ bu accident)

Scroll lock: Yep, every day. Double scroll lock and up/down switches my KVM from the dev machine to the work machine.

I've not used Numlock or Pause/Break for ages, though.

lol

[NuKe_MoNgOoSe]

With all the issues facing the world today this makes the news hahahahaha. I dont care about the caps lock button personally if im that hardup to shout my point ill use the shift key. Might burn a few extra calories but sometimes sacrifice must be made lol.

Turn your CAPS into another CTRL key

[jgtg32a]

If you are on Windows there is a reg change you can make that will turn you CAPS into a CTRL key and it is the greatest thing I've ever done to my computer. There is one huge caveat though if you are on someone else's computer it will turn into a huge annoyance though.

http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/disable_caps_lock/

Re:Turn your CAPS into another CTRL key

[wonkavader]

Google's doing something better.

You change your capslock key because it's not just a waste of space, it's a negative function and it's in the way.

Best to not put them on the keyboard in the first place.

Re:Turn your CAPS into another CTRL key

[h4rr4r]

Then Crtl should be where caps lock was and the lower crtl dropped.

Re:Turn your CAPS into another CTRL key

[jgtg32a]

Actually I didn't explain why it is the best thing ever, the control keys are really far away and will force you to break away from the home row. When you use the CAPS key you don't have that problem at all.

Re:Turn your CAPS into another CTRL key

[Lord Juan]

If you are on Windows there is a reg change you can make that will turn you CAPS into a CTRL key and it is the greatest thing I've ever done to my computer.

If you are on Linux is ridiculously easy to change the Caps Locks key to something different.

http://www.jveweb.net/en/archives/2010/11/making-better-use-of-the-caps-lock-key-in-linux.html

As a heavy Vim (and also a Vimperator) user who turned his Caps Lock key into an Escape key, this was also the greatest thing I have done, and my ability to work would be severely hindered by the lose of this key now. That alone means I wouldn't get a Google Netbook, but I am sure I am not their target market anyway (nor the iPad's).

Re:Turn your CAPS into another CTRL key

[Lord Juan]

Google's doing something better.

You change your capslock key because it's not just a waste of space, it's a negative function and it's in the way.

Best to not put them on the keyboard in the first place.

The reason they are removing the key is so people stop writing all in uppercase, not because is a waste of space or it's in the way (and you are probably referring to a different sort of negative function, not it's use to type comments in uppercase).

How to say this, we want that key there, we just don't want the current functionality that it has by default, it is a very convenient space in the keyboard.

Re:Turn your CAPS into another CTRL key

[laejoh]

And for those that have a xorg.conf:

Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:nocaps"

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[Partaolas]

I use it to change keyboard layouts, other people use it as a backspace or escape. Some applications use it for changing between different modes. In any case, who cares if they remove it? Quality of comments will not improve, even for those who will post using Google Chrome Notebook.

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[germansausage]

CAD guy here. We have lots of drawings where the convention is to put all text in caps. I use capslock all the time.

Change the key, keep the functionality

[stuntpope]

Perhaps the functionality should be retained, but entered via a function key or a two-key combination that requires pressing to enter that mode.

This way, people who need to type extended all-caps can still do so, but it won't be mistakenly keyed by dolts who hit it as a shift key and then flail away without returning it to lower case. Of course, people who want to be annoying and "shout" will still be able to do so, but it might cut down on the inadvertant clueless shouting.

Re:Change the key, keep the functionality

[dave024]

What about the dolts who mistakenly hit the two key combination and can't figure out how to turn it off?

Re:Change the key, keep the functionality

[stuntpope]

Screw 'em. Maybe that's a good time they seek education on the matter (user manual, support desk).

Re:Change the key, keep the functionality

[Nerdfest]

Tapping Shift 5 (configurable?) times will lock Caps in Windows if you enable 'sticky' keys ... and by 'sticky', I do not mean in the more traditional SlashDot style.

Re:By Accident

[naz404]

It's useful for typing headlines/subject headings/titles in no-format plaintext only documents (think notepad).

Useful for designing menus, buttons, titles & logos in Graphic design also.

And... I used to use it a lot when I was a little kid learning BASIC from old library books, as all the code then was written in uppercase so I would type them verbatim.

Since those old books were written in a single font, all uppercase helped separate computer code from from prose text.

Well there goes THAT idea...

[pspahn]

I have been mulling over the possibilities of adopting tablet devices at work so we can connect to our HP-UX server for access to the POS and inventory stuff. Other than logging in, everything must be entered in caps.

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe this will be the single motivating factor for finally upgrading our 20+ year old software.

Re:By Accident

[IBBoard]

Even that is probably unnecessary - unless it is a really bad app that can't automatically upper/lower-case all of the text.

Use of Caps Lock key

[managerialslime]

For modern web-based applications, you are correct that there is little or no reason for the Caps Lock key.

But for the MILLIONS of people whose job requires them to use antiquated legacy systems, it is often essential.

The largely character-based systems used for accounting, order entry, invoicing, and other core functions are often accessed through terminal emulation software or first generation client-server software. These systems often have a great number of "lookup" codes for everything from SKU to client numbers that fail when using lower case. Those still using first generation client-server software are especially inconvenienced as some of these programs have no option to remap the keyboard.

The sheer volume and costs of re-engineering these systems mean that they will be with us for years to come, no matter how ugly and inefficient when compared to modern systems.

(Well, you did ask.)

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[darjen]

Those people probably won't be using ChromeOS in the first place...

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[mdm-adph]

"For modern web-based applications, you are correct that there is little or no reason for the Caps Lock key."

Bingo. The Chrome laptop is a specialized piece of hardware for use with web applications -- we won't be using "antiquated legacy systems" on it. If one needs that functionality, don't buy a Chrome laptop.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess they'll need external USB Caps Lock buttons, like some laptop users who perform a lot of data entry use external number pads.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[toQDuj]

On top of that, in Japan, you can use the caps lock key to switch to a different kind of characterset. Quite useful, really...

B.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[nschubach]

I'm sure some Chinese company will release a small USB dongle that places a caps lock key just off to the side.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[Ephemeriis]

Yup. We absolutely need a caps lock key here.

Our EMR software is case-sensitive. Everyone's been trained to do it all in caps so that there's no trouble looking up information just because somebody capitalized something weird.

Folks fire up the EMR software, hit caps lock, and go on their way.

Which makes it very annoying when they tab out to send a quick email and you get the whole thing in caps...

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[AmiMoJo]

It makes you wonder if the programmers ever used the software themselves. Unless they program in all caps (a possibility, I admit) then you would think the first time one of them entered something in lowercase by mistake they would have gone to the input handling code and auto-converted everything to caps.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[Combatso]

how about we just relocate the caps lock key,.. somewhere where it doesnt get pressed by accident aS MUCH.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[firewrought]

But for the MILLIONS of people whose job requires them to use antiquated legacy systems, it is often essential.... The sheer volume and costs of re-engineering these systems mean that they will be with us for years to come, no matter how ugly and inefficient when compared to modern systems.

But realistically, that's not a good reason to avoid re-purposing the caps lock key. If so many people need it, options will emerge for re-enabling caps lock behavior when/where needed. And that's exactly what Google is doing by providing an option to revert the search key to caps lock. Even if they didn't, somebody else would develop a system extension or USB dongle or whatnot to provide the option to the minority of users that need it.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[photozz]

And are any of these MILLIONS (citation needed...) that need the cap-lock key every day going to be using a Google Chrome netbook? Most likely not. This is designed to be a light duty web tool, not a work machine. It's like asking butter knives to cut down trees. Sure they both cut things..but use the right tool for the job.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It seems to me that they could use "legacy compatible" keyboards and let everyone else go on their merry way. I don't see the need to have it on a netbook when retail point of sale doesn't use netbooks. When you're designing a netbook, you really do need to take a very hard look at everything to make sure it's necessary, because there is so little space to be had.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[Cajun Hell]

But for the MILLIONS of people whose job requires them to use antiquated legacy systems, it is often essential.

How odd that Google's notebook isn't targeting this niche. I wonder what other 3170 keys it lacks. ;)

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[PortaDiFerro]

I use Colemak keymap where Caps Lock is mapped as backspace. I still use it too much.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[mcmonkey]

For modern web-based applications, you are correct that there is little or no reason for the Caps Lock key.

But for the MILLIONS of people whose job requires them to use antiquated legacy systems, it is often essential.

So anything that is not a "modern web-based application" is an "antiquated legacy system"?

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[moosesocks]

Except that Google brought some reps from Citrix up onto the stage to demonstrate exactly that.

I actually thought that the Citrix demo had the potential to be game-changing. They almost completely divorced business applications from the platform that they run on, and used a dead-simple Linux-derived OS as the client. The idea that corporate users could deploy *any* app, regardless of the OS that it natively runs on to almost *any* end-user is pretty tantalizing. OS lock-in is suddenly no longer an issue, no software needs to be rewritten, and client maintenance got a whole lot simpler. It'd be hard to pitch a more appealing proposal to a corporate sysadmin/beancounter.

(Of course, you could take care of the caps lock thing at the terminal emulation level, by remapping an unused hotkey combination as a Caps Lock toggle. It's a non-issue, and I'm sure there will be other hardware that has the button included. Unlike iOS devices, the platform is open, which I suspect will be a very important thing to the corporate world, as vendors can customize hardware to fit their customers needs.)

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[sgunhouse]

Or of course when typing something that requires capital letters, especially mixed with numbers. I use it most often when keeping track of serial numbers of my valuables, for example. But I've also used it with capchas if they don't have mixed case - when they say to type what you see I try to be exact.

I use Ctrl a lot more than CapsLock and can see why some keyboards swap the two, but it should still be available somewhere.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[l0b0]

I hope they didn't patent that, because I've been doing that ever since I realized it was the only sane use of Caps Lock. Not that anyone thinks I'm sane to use Dvorak, but hey...

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[Ozymandias_KoK]

In Windows, using alt-shift you can cycle through various keyboards and character sets you may have installed. It needn't be caps lock only.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[DragonWriter]

For modern web-based applications, you are correct that there is little or no reason for the Caps Lock key.

But for the MILLIONS of people whose job requires them to use antiquated legacy systems, it is often essential.

That's probably why ChromeOS, while switching the default use of the key to be a Search hotkey that Google expects will be more useful than Caps Lock to most Chrome OS users, has simple setting in the Settings menu that changes the function of the key in the traditional Caps Lock position from "Search" to "Caps Lock".

Thus neatly addressing the needs of those people who, in general or even just for a period of time, really need a Caps Lock key.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[swrider]

Exactly!, or should I type EXACTLY! ? The position of the Caps Lock key is one of the worst examples of poor design. That is why one of the first things I do on a new PC is to reprogram the Caps Lock key to a Tab function and reprogram the Shift-PrntScr key (otherwise useless) to the Caps Lock function.

It would be nice if this didn't require registry editing, but it only needs to be done once per computer.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[gstrickler]

Those applications are exactly why I wrote this email signature a few years ago:

If it were up to me, computer keyboards would not have a caps lock key. Everything would be lower case unless you deliberately hit the shift key. Not only would this decrease the amount of SHOUTING in emails, but it would force all of those programmers who only allow upper case input to go back and fix their lousy programs.

The main drawback to this is it might inspire *nix programmers to write more programs that only accept lower case or are case dependent. Therefore, we might have to create keyboards that randomly switch between upper and lower case unless you're holding down a modifier key. This would continue until programmers have been so thoroughly trained not to write unnecessarily case dependent programs that the very thought is considered evidence of insanity.

Of course, the second paragraph is just me being sarcastic. Realistically, there is no need for a caps lock key. A caps lock function can be implemented using either a double tap of the shift key, with the next usage of shift removing caps lock. In this fashion, it would work similar (but not the same) as the shift/shift-lock on older typewriters. Once it's locked, pressing shift again releases it. Alternatively, you could use a modifier key with the shift key for a caps lock function. ctrl-shift, alt/option-shift, or fn/func-shift.

For a couple years, I've had the caps lock key on my Mac keyboards reassigned as a control key. So, yes, I'm in favor of this.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[toQDuj]

on Mac OS X, it's shift-ctrl-command-space. Still, only one button is easier than any key combination..

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[DavMz]

I am not japanese, but have been living in Japan for 8 years, and I type japanese on a regular basis. Caps Lock is the only one of the 5 keys (+5 function keys) that my NETBOOK has for characters switching that I don't use. From my experience, it acts exactly the same as the key.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[toQDuj]

I live here too, but I have a us-international keyboard (MacBook Pro). The advantage is that I have a larger spacebar, but character set switching is not as easy as I'd have liked. caps lock helps in this case.

Re:Use of Caps Lock key

[HyperQuantum]

For modern web-based applications, you are correct that there is little or no reason for the Caps Lock key.

But for the MILLIONS of people whose job requires them to use antiquated legacy systems, it is often essential.

Then why not switch Caps Lock with the left Ctrl key? Ctrl is used more often, and it's more difficult to accidentally hit Caps Lock if it's located at the bottom-left corner of the keyboard.

ABOUT TIME

[hackstraw]

I never understood why there is a hardware button that was SOOOO easy to hit by accident over something that could much easier and better been done with software.

Can all hardware vendors get away from the CAPLOCKS key?

Re:ABOUT TIME

[Nerdfest]

... and for developers, right underneath one of the keys that is used most frequently as well.

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[LynnwoodRooster]

That's the only time I use mine - for documenting 2D drawings of parts. HOWEVER, I doubt I'll be doing CAD work on a Chrome OS based product; at least, as far as I know Alibre does not have plans to release a cloud-based 3D parametric CAD system!

Doom is ruined

[FloydTheDroid]

Curse you Google! How am I supposed to run now!?!

CTRL Key

[gbr]

Please, please, please put the CTRL key back there, where it belongs.

I remap my capslock to CTRL on every machine I use.

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[meloneg]

I use NumLock. Well, I make sure it's always on. I guess I never un-use NumLock. At least when using a full-size keyboard.

Pause/Break is handy in Windows. Try hitting Win-Pause sometime.

Capslock is Still there

[jac89]

It has already been reported that you can change the search key back into a caps lock key if you so desire through a preference. http://www.istartedsomething.com/20101208/fear-not-chrome-os-has-caps-lock/

Re:By Accident

[Tynin]

i did to toggle running in some game a long time ago !

Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, capslock set autorun for you.

Why the hell do I still remember this!?

Re:By Accident

[Vectormatic]

i cant remember ever running into software which was case-sensitive when it comes to license keys..

but yeah, it isnt all that usefull of a key.. but taking it away to "improve the quality of comments" is just stupid

Why do people do that?

[ISurfTooMuch]

No, seriously, can anyone explain to me why some people insist on capitalizing every letter in their e-mails and/or comments? I've been wondering about this for years, and I've never been able to figure it out. I seriously doubt these folks write in all caps when they use a pen (or do they???), so why do they do it on a computer? What is their "logic" for this?

Re:Why do people do that?

[meloneg]

My mother insists that her old eyes can read the all-caps better. Next time I'm in town, I plan to sneak onto her computer and increase the base font size.

Re:Why do people do that?

[vlm]

No, seriously, can anyone explain to me why some people insist on capitalizing every letter in their e-mails and/or comments? .... I seriously doubt these folks write in all caps when they use a pen (or do they???),

Nobody does CAD/Blueprints in cursive, not by hand and not by CAD. A large segment of the working population had their first interaction with "the computer" via CAD, not necessarily as a drafter but as a reader of what was drafted. So of course ALL "computer stuff" should be done in all caps block letters.

Also the more blue collar the more likely their penmanship is unreadable thus the more likely there is to be a workplace rule that all handwritten communication is to be all block letters / all caps just to simplify.

Re:Why do people do that?

[aaaantoine]

I seriously doubt these folks write in all caps when they use a pen (or do they???)

I actually don't write in all-caps on computers (except for a demonstration I typed in an earlier comment). Yet, when I write with a pen I prefer to write in block letters. Just a stylistic preference of mine. I don't very much like my lowercase penmanship.

I've found that people who type in all caps typically do it for the same reason I handwrite in all caps: because to them, it looks better. I'm not saying I approve of it in typing, just that I see why people do it.

The old saying goes....

[SGDarkKnight]

when a company finds a way to make the world a little more foolproof, the world will make a better fool....

Re:The old saying goes....

[VortexCortex]

when a company finds a way to make the world a little more foolproof, the world will make a better fool....

Yes, they will just hold down shift while typing.

"According to Google, this will improve the quality of the comments, because people will not be able to write all in capital letters.

If Google's goal was to limit the number of annoying all-caps posts they should not be relying on the removal of a caps lock key on a device that very few of their users will actually be using... (In other words: they lied to you; Google removed the caps lock key because their hardware designer is a member of the Jobsian Minimalist Cult.)

Web Coder Rule #1: Validate All Input Server Side.

Removing the caps is akin to validating the input on the Client Side with JavaScript, and not validating it at all Server Side. This is a huge mistake.

IMO, since Google employs at least one high-school level coder, they should get said coder to validate user post content on the server side: Replace long strings of all-caps words with lower case equivalents.

Hints: In Perl, the "lc" builtin function. In C++, it's the "tolower" function. In Java or JavaScript use "String.toLowerCase", in PHP use "strtolower", in Python use... wait, no, in Python you're screwed, try to write your own locale independent to lowercase function (good luck with that. damn Python, WTF!).

Bonus: provide a button next to posts that were converted to lowercase so that I can see the original post's text if I so desire (False positives are always a possibility; Post could be laden with acronyms).

WTF?

[gstoddart]

I assume this bit is from a Slashdot posting and not Google:

According to Google, this will improve the quality of the comments, because people will not be able to write all in capital letters. I'm not a fan of the caps lock key myself. I never use it, so it can go to hell, for all I'm concerned. But taking away choice from people is not good, especially when this is not going to improve the quality of comments.

Attention people -- keyboards are use for more than posting comments.

What the hell kind of drivel is this?

Re:WTF?

[spxero]

+1 Agreed

I personally use caps lock for parts of some passwords, for headings on papers and documentation (sometimes), as well as upper case letters. For my typing, the only time I use shift is when I need to type a symbol. For me the shift+letter combination is much slower than the caps+letter[or multiples]+caps.

Why would it even need to be taken away? Leave the key there and let the user map it. This seems very much like one of those "lets do this because I don't use this so no one does" things. Just like the tabs-at-the-top browser, this is something that doesn't need to change for change's sake.

Re:WTF?

[entotre]

So that quote is from the article (gizmodo), where Jesus expresses his own opinion.

Re:WTF?

[cmdrpaddy]

I watched some of the webcast yesterday on youtube. The comment was clearly tongue in cheek and was in no way meant to be taken seriously.

Re:WTF?

[jonaskoelker]

Attention people -- keyboards are use for more than posting comments.

Welcome to the new internet, where you only use your keyboard for posting comments in forums; the celebrity porn videos (and circuses) you *click* on (duh!)

Case Sensitive Language

[Thelasko]

I code in a case sensitive language and use case to indicate different data types. This would be a huge pain!

Re:Case Sensitive Language

[Rockoon]

Well, many people feel that the tokens camelCase and CamelCase should never be allowed to refer to different symbols...

...many others feel different.

The problem is of course that its all-or-nothing. A language that only restricts on that specific case-sensitivity would be even more bizarre than a language that is completely insensitive.

Re:Case Sensitive Language

[gstoddart]

Well, many people feel that the tokens camelCase and CamelCase should never be allowed to refer to different symbols...

Well, I've just always programmed in languages that are case sensitive ... C, C++, C#, Java ... the few I've bumped into that are case insensitive are scripting languages.

I guess I just learned that CAMEL, Camel, CaMel and camel are all different literals. It doesn't rely on an interpreter to say "oh, you meant this, I'll ignore it". I'm used to a compiler saying "I have no idea what camEl is".

And, from experience, I'd rather have camel case than that whole "Hungarian Notation" which more or less made variables pointlessly hard to read.

Guess it depends on what you learned with, but I find case-insensitive brings its own problems. ASCII provided us with a lexical sort ordering (for good or for ill), and throwing that away isn't always a good thing.

Re:Case Sensitive Language

[jisatsusha]

Visual Basic, SQL, probably others. PHP has case-insensitive function names iirc.

Re:Case Sensitive Language

[Rockoon]

Well, I've just always programmed in languages that are case sensitive ... C, C++, C#, Java ... the few I've bumped into that are case insensitive are scripting languages.

Pascal, Delphi, Basic, ...

And, from experience, I'd rather have camel case than that whole "Hungarian Notation" which more or less made variables pointlessly hard to read.

I am aware of no language that either requires or forebodes hungarian notation. Thats something completely different. The closest thing to requiring it would have to be early basics that used type warts (% suffix to mean integer and $ suffix to mean string.)

Some languages use case to mean specific things by requirement, such as Haskel (types always begin with an upper case character, variable never have an upper case character)

Re:CAPS LOCK

[meloneg]

Never mind. Google is clearly correct.

How about å, ä, ö, and ø?

[G3ckoG33k]

How about å, ä, ö, and ø?

I know quite a few Vikings who are pissed at the lack of it in plain ASCII.

Unfortunately, Columbians have taken control of the matter from Erkissonians. An now Göögle?!

Re:How about å, ä, ö, and ø?

[gstoddart]

I know quite a few Vikings who are pissed at the lack of it in plain ASCII.

Well, the A in ASCII does stand for American, so I don't think anybody is worried about the Vikings.

Re:How about å, ä, ö, and ø?

[gstoddart]

It's got precious little to do with ASCII. The problem arises because to this day way too much software assumes that people do not use characters with codes greater than 127.

Ummmm ... except that, by definition, that is a legacy of ASCII. Character 127 was the highest you could have in ASCII without getting into the realm of escape chars -- that's what 8-bit clean means, and why UTF-8 was constructed in such a way as to directly be backwards compatible with it. For literally decades, ASCII was what we used, and nobody really thought out how to handle "exotic" characters.

Of course you are free to wrap your self in an american flag, flip the rest of the world a bird and tell it to go screw it self, but when the rest of the world constitutes a significant portion of your customers that might be a bad idea... unless you like to loose money.

Nice screed, but I'm not American, and I'm not even defending it. I said nobody is worried about the Vikings as the OP said -- it was a joke.

I'm perfectly aware of the fact that historically North American biases still exist in a lot of computing, and that getting everybody to properly support Unicode is a god thing (as there are loads of applications which will simply fail to properly handle them). I've had no end of professional headaches as I discover that some program simply can't properly handle anything more than simple ASCII.

But, if you think these limitations aren't a legacy of ASCII, you're woefully mistaken.

Re:How about å, ä, ö, and ø?

[donscarletti]

Well, the A in ASCII does stand for American, so I don't think anybody is worried about the Vikings.

Well, Europe was always free to standardise on its own default 7 bit encoding. But aren't we all glad they didn't? It would have made dealing with foreign keyboards and computers so much more difficult for us all and really slowed development down. I am sure that the guys who made ASCII were not doing it out of nationalism, but simply because it never really entered in their head that some people needed it.

Re:How about å, ä, ö, and ø?

[gstoddart]

Well, Europe was always free to standardise on its own default 7 bit encoding. But aren't we all glad they didn't? It would have made dealing with foreign keyboards and computers so much more difficult for us all and really slowed development down.

Well, unfortunately, Asia did need to come up with their own character encodings. I'm also not convinced that a lot of European countries didn't have to sort out all sorts of problems. I seem to recall Microsoft also had to work pretty hard to build their own ways of providing international character encodings (Windows Code Pages) before Unicode was adopted as a standard.

I have no doubt that the people who built it were simply doing what they needed and it didn't occur to them that 50 years later we'd still be using it. And I seriously doubt it was nationalism -- they just didn't deal with these characters.

Re:How about å, ä, ö, and ø?

[sean.peters]

I'm from Minnesota, you insensitive clod!

Re:How about å, ä, ö, and ø?

[gstoddart]

I'm from Minnesota, you insensitive clod!

I think you misspelled "cold".

Aww, have some cheese and herring -- that should cheer you up.

And say hi to Brett Favre for me. ;-)

Re:How about å, ä, ö, and ø?

[quacking duck]

How were such characters produced when manual (not even electric) typewriters were still the norm?

Yes, the most likely explanation would be to use the backspace key and overtype the marks onto the standard characters, but what keys produced those marks?

Re:How about å, ä, ö, and ø?

[owlstead]

"Java programs often have this problem for example"

One of the clear advantages of Java over C/C++ is that it uses a clear distinction between character encodings and strings. The support of Unicode is quite extensive, even going to the point of supporting the latest versions. Java compatible VM's (yes, I know, there is only one) are even required to support a specific base set of encodings. Yes, C/C++ libraries have this too, but there is no unified string handling across the platform.

Of course that does not influence people that don't even bother to read or adhere to the basic tips in the language tutorials and use the platform encoding for everything. Another issue is that Java is used to not throw exceptions if unknown characters are imported or printed. So your comment is correct, but please don't forget that this is because idiot programming, not the language itself.

For those lazy programmers that program for Java version >= 1.6 and don't like to catch exceptions:

"Look ma, no checked exceptions".getBytes(Charset.forName("ASCII")

This will throw a RuntimeException if it *ever* encounters a VM without support for ASCII (or UTF-8 or other character formats that MUST be supported by the runtime).

Also note that everybody is free to configure the CharsetDecoder/Encoder in such a way that illegal characters are not ignored.

Re:How about å, ä, ö, and ø?

[HishamMuhammad]

I guess you didn't get the joke about Columbus and Eriksson.

Hint: the A in ASCII stands for a land discovered by Leif Eriksson.

poor vision

[aristofanes]

easiest way to send a short email to a friend with very poor vision

Architectural drawings

[digitect]

Good luck creating architectural drawings. (IMAA)

It has been convention since the beginning of time to write everything in CAPs. Not that conventions can't change, but there is a whole system of communication in the construction industry related to the assumption that instructions and notations are always capitalized. Similar reason to why US construction is still Imperial, there is too much embodied energy in the current method to risk confusing it with a change to another system.

Re:Architectural drawings

[Nerdfest]

That seems like a very bad idea as all-caps has been proven to be more difficult to read than lower or mixed case. Sometimes conventions need a push ... not that this will be that push. If your software knows something should be in upper case, it can convert should automatically.

Re:Architectural drawings

[Ninja Programmer]

Well if everything in architectural drawings is in CAPS then ... why couldn't you just default all input to Caps (as if Capslock has been pressed to start with) and use shift to get the lower-case keys?

Re:Architectural drawings

[mcnellis]

Something tells me you're not going to be creating architectural drawings on ChromeOS anyway...

Re:Architectural drawings

[bornon5]

There are many typefaces (like Small Caps) that convert all text to capital letters. Chances are that most CAD software has these typefaces as defaults.

Don't take it away

[kellyb9]

I don't necessarily think they should take the option away. I just think it should by one of those buttons where you have to hit a function key + caps lock. I don't necessarily use caps lock, but I'm sure there are people who do. My only problem is that I always accidently hit when I'm going for shift or tab and its just a pain.

They are not taking away my caps-lock key

[slim]

... they are offering me the opportunity to buy a device that doesn't have a caps-lock key.

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[slaker]

Pause is occasionally useful during PC repair since it'll freeze boot messages on the screen. CTRL-Break is functionally the same as CTRL-C in most places, just harder to type. Windows key-Pause brings up the System Properties applet on most versions of Windows.

One step further

[RingDev]

After a series of unfortunate caps-lock incidents years ago, I've taken to popping off the caps lock key on any QWERTY (-- yes, I held the shift button to type that) keyboard I use regularly.

While it is annoying that the infrastructure guys keep asking me if I want a new keyboard, it beats dealing with the accidental capping, especially when working in languages that are case sensitive.

-Rick

Re:One step further

[h4rr4r]

You could just remap it and not get stupid questions. I make mine control, which I use a lot and is what the keyboards I used once upon a time looked like.

Re:By Accident

[iguana]

Programming.

The convention in C/C++ programming is to put preprocessor symbols in all caps.

#define THIS_IS_A_PREPROCESSOR_SYMBOL 42

good

[monkyyy]

i always hated caps lock, ive never really used it, but its always next to tab, shift and a, which are used in games often, begging me to hit it accentually

Not as bad as Apple

[shikaisi]

At least they're better than Apple. If Steve had his way, you would only ever be allowed one key to press.

Not as bad as Apple...

[Scyth3]

We're making a huge deal about the caps lock key being removed on an ultra-portable laptop. On Apple's Macbook Pro the "backspace" key was renamed to "delete" and the delete key itself is completely gone. I think that's far worse then the caps lock key going away, especially since you can still use shift keys to capitalize text.

Re:Not as bad as Apple...

[jo_ham]

Press Function + backspace/delete to get the opposite effect. You can toggle this in System Prefs, or set up a specific rule just for that key if you want it the other way.

The MBP keyboard layout is identical to the Apple Bluetooth k/b, that I have in front of me right now, except the keys are labelled a little differently - the delete/backspace key has a left-pointing arrow, the tab key has a tab-stop icon, and the caps lock has a thick upward pointing arrow with a break in the segment - all of these keys on the MBP have been labelled with words.

They did it with the option key too, which is a fork-ike icon on many Mac keyboards, but is actually labelled "option" on the MBP.

Re:By Accident

[Morth]

Thai keyboards use it to switch to latin.

Google netbook hack: Caps lock

[Kaziganthi]

I hacked my netbook so I would have a caps-lock key. I jammed silly putty down the side of the shift key to hold it down for me. Next release will include toggle functionality (considering an easily removable alternative like wood chip to jam the key down).

Re:By Accident

[PrescriptionWarning]

Not for typing or programming have I ever needed to use the Capslock key. Its just as useless as the recently deceased Scroll Lock key.

Taking away choice ...

[Anonymous Coward]

> But taking away choice from people is not good

Taking away choice is often a good thing. How often would people plug in cables wrong if the ends were not keyed in some fashion? How often would weekend movers (driving a truck for the first time) barrel down the highway at 90mph if there was not a governor on the engine.

Most of a society's laws are based on taking away choice.

The problem is what they replaced it with

[oxfletch]

Getting rid of caps lock - awesome.
Replacing it with a search key - asinine.

You're just going to clip it accidentally and pop up some irritating search window.

Put ctrl back where it belongs - if you want a search key, put it somewhere out the way.

Re:The problem is what they replaced it with

[geekoid]

assomoe who needs to use all caps as part of his work, I find a caps lock key very effective.

And yes, I do use a notebook to dial in and do work; albeit rarely these days.

It's a big loss.

[Raving_Zealot]

Personally I use the caps lock key to switch current keyboard layout (English/Russian). YEAH, IN SOVIET RUSSIA, CAPS LOCK USES YOU.

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[Nick Fel]

There are lots of legitimate uses for Caps Lock - but are you going to be doing those things on your Chrome Netbook? Remember this is a device primarily for browsing the Internet.

Re:By Accident

[alta]

because you're like me and spent way too much time playing?

And if you're really like me you got kinda bored that it was dragging on so long, you went and got the cheats to make you uber strong, and could fly, and then went around attacking the god at the end?

It's useless anyway

[a_nonamiss]

I've been using this Windows hack to turn my Caps Lock key into a regular old Shift key for about a year now. I hardly noticed, except I don't have sentences tHAT LOOK LIKE THIS ANYMORE.

Re:It's useless anyway

[jamiedolan]

I've been using this Windows hack to turn my Caps Lock key into a regular old Shift key for about a year now. I hardly noticed, except I don't have sentences tHAT LOOK LIKE THIS ANYMORE.

Don't you look at what your typing on the screen, while your typing it? I don't understand how people can write whole pages in all caps and not notice it. Hunt and Peck typing? Jamie

Re:By Accident

[nitehawk214]

i cant remember ever running into software which was case-sensitive when it comes to license keys..

I recall running into this because I was ticked off that I had typed the thing in in lower case first. However it was certainly not any software in the last 10 years, and I doubt I have typed more then a handful of license keys in the last 5. (online software distribution ftw)

Also I seem to recall many capchas are case sensitive. I usually type matched case on those just to be sure. When they hit you with a long string of caps, I use caps-lock. Aside from that, it is occasionally handy for certain work, but only slightly. I would be quite happy with a software-only caps-lock solution. (though from the story it does not seem like this is going to be an option)

No...

[John Hasler]

...Google does not want to take away my capslock key. They want to not install one on a product they intend to make. If it's important to you don't buy the product. If it's really important tell them why you don't intend to buy the product. But don't act as though their decision as to how to design their product is some sort of outrageous infringement on your rights.

I wouldn't miss it myself, and it makes sense to leave it off a compact machine where space is at a premium.

Caps-Lock IS useful, to me.

[BESTouff]

At least on a Linux French keyboard, the capslock key is the only way to get upperase accentuated letters, like ÉÈÇÀ. I hope there will be an alternative way of entering them.

Re:Caps-Lock IS useful, to me.

[SteveFoerster]

No problem, just keep a text file open at all times that has all those characters in it, and alt-tab back and forth to copy and paste as needed. Who needs an extra key when you can do that?~

Re:Caps-Lock IS useful, to me.

[ddxexex]

Looking at Wikipedia, it seems Capslock is very important to Japanese keyboards as well as its used to toggle the alphanumeric characters instead of hirigana or katakana. I can't speak from experience but I would assume that key is used a lot. Hopefully, Google is smart enough to realize that that key is useful in other languages and includes that button on languages that need them. With French I can see fixing the input to allow shift-letter-ctrl-accent (or however it works) and everyone being happy, but with a non-latin alphabet telling people to use some other key because the key causes people using a different keyboard layout to yell won't make people too happy.

Re:Caps-Lock IS useful, to me.

[fishbowl]

French typing is high on the list of reasons I love my Mac. For me, it is simply the most intuitive input system for accented characters. I have long wished that I could emulate the Mac option key input method in Linux.

Re:Caps-Lock IS useful, to me.

[fishbowl]

I touch type in French. The very idea of copy and pasting characters that way would be absolutely horrible. Think of writing 20,000 words per day with your method and get back to me.

Re:Caps-Lock IS useful, to me.

[SteveFoerster]

Sorry, I thought the idea was ridiculous enough that everyone would realize that I was kidding.

I even put that ~ after it for sarcasm like that guy's sig suggests.

Re:Caps-Lock IS useful, to me.

[Neil Boekend]

You could do all the letters like that. You need just 5 keys: alt, tab, ctrl, c and v. For convenience you can even combine them, thus requiring only 3 keys: alt-tab, ctrl-c and ctrl-v!
We can compact that even more. Use a (proprietary) version of morse code to encode these 3 characters and require only 1 key!

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[Vanderhoth]

We use acronyms heavily where I work. Caps lock makes typing paragraphs of them easier.

Watch out...

[brettz9]

for BIG BROTHER...

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[gad_zuki!]

Yes,but you don't need a key for it. You could program your keyboard to accept a double-click on shift to be the same as caps lock.

There's a larger conversation here about archaic keyboard conventions that's worth having. In fact, vendors are individually addressing them in a way that's just confusing for end users. I have a MS keyboard where the function buttons have been turned into shortcuts. I needed to press a Function lock to actually use f1, f2, f3, etc. I also just used some laptop, not sure if it was a lenovo or an HP, but it also had the same thing going on, except I couldnt just enable f1, f2, f3, etc, I have to hold down the function key to get those to work individually - which is the opposite of how laptop keyboards generally work.

Pause/break key? Scroll lock? There's a lot of room for improvement, but I don't think keyboards follow any standard.

NumLock off is for remapping! :D

[ClayJar]

I remapped the non-NumLock keypad to the various keys to control my TiVo in SlingPlayer. Zero is the 30-second skip button, the decimal point is back-skip, nine and six page up and down, five and two play and pause, eight is the TiVo button, and SlingPlayer mute and system mute round out the rest.

It's actually quite a nice system (much nicer than Control-F, Control-B, and other seemingly randomly-chosen keys). I use AutoHotKey to set focus to the SlingPlayer window and send the key or keys, so they work regardless of which window had focus. Makes it trivial to skip commercials, but I retain the use of the numeric keypad.

Re:NumLock off is for remapping! :D

[PRMan]

You put 30-Second Skip to the left of Instant Replay???

Missing the point?

[apdyck]

I think that most people are missing the point of what Google is trying to do. They are not so much removing the Caps Lock key as they are adding a Search key. On a PC that is designed around web browsing (not coding, drafting, etc.) this makes quite a bit of sense. I for one never use the Caps Lock key but my wife uses it constantly. I believe that removing it would force her to learn to type correctly and therefore increase her overall typing speed. Having a search button, on the other hand, will make it very easy to pull up a search box when you're in a hurry to find out what the latest buzz is on your favorite topic.

Re:Missing the point?

[PRMan]

And what happens when you start browsing the web at work? You get super annoyed because the Search window won't come up and everyone starts wondering why you are shouting at them...

Re:By Accident

[basscomm]

I'm not sure I have ever pressed the Caps Lock key on purpose... Anyone?

I did when I was programming COBOL back in college... *shudder*

Re:Can't say I've missed mine

[a_nonamiss]

You're welcome ;-)

What is the audience?

[ilsaloving]

I see everyone commenting about how they really need capslock, but almost every single one of them says it is for a specialized need like accessing legacy systems. What is the likelyhood that you are going to use an underpowered subnotebook for doing CAD? Or using it as a terminal for accessing a mainframe? Well, maybe the latter, but there are plenty of other options out there.

This laptop is meant for people who are going to be using the web almost exclusively. I for one, welcome our lower case overlords. It will make daily web usage a better place.

Re:What is the audience?

[holamundo]

Let's talk about a perfectly common application then - typing in a foreign language such as Japanese or Chinese. You could change back and forth between your input methods to alternate between English and these foreign languages, but most of these support typing English when you press the Shift key, so it's much more convenient when you just want to put a few English letters here and there.

Oh right, so what has the Shift key got to do with Caps Lock? Remember how you capitalize without the Caps Lock?

Can't we just replace Shift to other keys for these quick English typing in ChromeOS you say? Well, which key should we use instead?

So I'm just a little confused as to why they would want to optimize this little key out. Perhaps they have such great rationales other than trying to stand out in the crowd? Or it's not for foreigners seeing that the pilot test is limited to the US only?

Re:By Accident

[fracai]

Phhht, Spazeroid.

Re:By Accident

[Lord Byron II]

Except, you would normally hold shift to write that, because if you use caps-lock, then you're tapping shift for every underscore you want to add. Holding shift is just easier.

Nooooooo

[Tyler Eaves]

Now I won't have a big button under my pinky to remap to Ctrl....

Re:By Accident

[Kilrah_il]

And the Hebrew keyboard uses it for Nikkud (The Hebrew diacritic signs, used instead of vowels). Although most writing in Hebrew is w/o Nikkud, sometimes it is used to help differentiate words with similar spelling but different pronunciations.

Horray, google!

[Geoffrey.landis]

Excellent.
Don't stop there; There are a lot of other useless keys on my way-too-big keyboard as well.
There are 127 keys on the keyboard in front of me right now. By my count, over 40 of these are little buttons that are used so rarely that they could be easily removed and replaced by key combinations with no loss in functionality

Screensaver Release

[Doc Ruby]

I use the Caps Lock key only to deactivate my screensaver without disturbing any app state. But I really like it for that.

Also, I like idiots to be able to Caps Lock and scream their messages at me, so I can quickly tell they're idiots to be ignored. What would really be useful would be a browser plugin that replaced those with an "ALL CAPS" flag that could be toggled to examine just what kind of idiot is screaming at me.

Re:Screensaver Release

[PRMan]

I usually use Right Shift for that...

Re:Screensaver Release

[Doc Ruby]

The Right Shift key what kind of idiot is posting ;)? I've got to move my Right Pinky off the Backspace key sometime :).

Re:Screensaver Release

[Nerdfest]

The browser plug-in is an excellent idea. I'd also give it the option to blank out the all-caps comment as opposed to case-converting it.

Good freakin riddance!

[Youngbull]

nuff said!

Isn't there a browser plug-in for this?

[damn_registrars]

I would think someone would have written a browser plug-in by now that would detect all-caps writing and automagically correct it to caps-free.

Of course, there are a few people out there who use caps because their eyesight is so terrible that they cannot read the writing on the screen unless it is all caps; perhaps instead the caps lock key should increment the size of the default font?

EXCELLENT!

[Ilsundal]

If you're HARDCORE you hold DOWN the SHIFT key when you need all CAPS. Kudos to Google for bringing out the hardcore typist in us all! That crappy key was nothing but problems.

Re:EXCELLENT!

[Kaziganthi]

I'm betting you used caps lock for the uppercase words.

It's not losing Caps Lock that I'm worried about.

[QuantumBeep]

It's not losing Caps Lock that I'm worried about.

It's losing the ability to turn Caps Lock OFF is it's turned on by software.

For the humor impaired

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone else actually watch the webcast? This seemed to be a joke aside, in the midst of explaining the tradeoffs required to put a full-sized keyboard in a small form factor.

Re:By Accident

[tagno25]

What about double tapping shift for shift lock? They could implement that.

Re:It's not losing Caps Lock that I'm worried abou

[clone52431]

[Win]+[R], osk, [Enter]

And what software turns Cap Lock on?

Re:YOU CAN PRISE THE CAPSLOCK KEY

[monkyyy]

1TS EASY!!!! :P

butbutbut...

[Schadrach]

CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!

PS: This PS added to avoid /. filtering. Silly thing felt I was using too many capital letters. =/

Re:By Accident

[Tynin]

Yeah :) setting your athletics up into the thousands so you literally jumped from one side of the world to the other was quite a lot of fun. Still, to this day, if the game lets me jump, I keep hitting spacebar, jumping around as if possessed. All because Morrowind forced you to jump to raise your athletics skill.

The "SCREAM" police ...

[Rambo Tribble]

... are invading my posts?

Re:By Accident

[nschubach]

I remember playing an MMO (don't remember which one) that had some sort of home grown key monitor (or they somehow ignored caps lock.) You had to literally hold shift to type in all caps and it was great when someone would apologize for caps trying to get attention. Then they would blame it on their caps lock and the chat would light up with all kinds of comments.

Aaaaaand...

[prodevel]

Caps-lock key hack in 3... 2...

What's the real reason here?

[MysteriousPreacher]

If they were truly serious then they'd have browser/chat program/online game close automatically if any text written by the user contains more than two consecutive exclamations or any occurrences of "ur".

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[nschubach]

I did, but the only feeling I got was from all the people in my office looking at me funny.

"This affects me too"

[tepples]

I just submitted a bug on Chrome that it doesn't have a command line --geometry option, which I consider a pseudo standard thing for X apps.

Have you filed similar bugs against all of Mozilla's products?

Does searching for a bug that someone else filed and adding yourself as a CC+voter count as filing?

Re:"This affects me too"

[John Hasler]

Yes.

Caps-lock never existed

[O'Nazareth]

Caps-lock has never been handled properly by most of OS. It is usually a "shift-lock". It is a problem for instance on a French keyboard mapping. It is not possible to type correct French with a shift-lock instead of a caps-lock.

Defense Contracting

[stewbacca]

We so many acronyms in defense contracting that my caps lock key is on for nearly every third word.

Re:Defense Contracting

[DragonWriter]

While I use acronyms a lot in my work, I rarely use Caps Lock since for one word at a time (even if it is every other word) its easier just to use Shift. But if you need Caps Lock functionality in Chrome OS, there is a setting to change the function of what Google calls the modifier key from Search to Caps Lock.

So there really is no story here. Google just figures most Chrome OS users are going to use Search more often than Caps Lock.

Re:By Accident

[darkshadow88]

but yeah, it isnt all that usefull of a key.. but taking it away to "improve the quality of comments" is just stupid

Did it ever occur to you that maybe the "improving the quality of comments" bit was a joke? In fact, I would bet that Google was facetiously mocking the way Apple spins every shortcoming of their products as a "feature". Besides, the Caps Lock key is merely replaced with a search key, which can be switched back to Caps Lock if desired. Here's Google's comment on the matter:

“If you really need Caps Lock so you can post an INSIGHTFUL COMMENT ON YOUTUBE, click the wrench, click Settings, and then go to the System section to change the Modifier Key from a Search key to a Caps Lock key.”

Re:By Accident

[a_nonamiss]

I once came across an application where I had to enter a registration key. I entered something like:

ah745-x8d8e-fe02w-8s89e

The program returned an error that said "It looks like you used lowercase letters. All serial numbers for this program have uppercase-only letters."

So whatever idiot programmed this knew to check to ensure the serial number didn't have lowercase numbers, and thought to return an error message to the user, but didn't think to just interpret lowercase as uppercase. Now, I'm not a programmer, but isn't the former actually more lines of code than just accepting lower or uppercase letters?

Now, thinking like a programmer, he was probably trying to teach the idiot user a lesson, but it really seemed like poor programming to me at the time. Aren't you guys supposed to be coddling the users?

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[nschubach]

I always had a laugh at this. Win+'Break' to bring up system properties... It always felt like a warning to me.

Stupid? Really?

[killmenow]

I am subscribed to an e-mail list for people and families of people with a genetic disorder that causes a variety of symptoms often including some form of vision problems and anywhere from mild to severe mental retardation. My son has the disorder and the e-mail list is a vital tool for the community of people facing the challenges associated with it. At least one member of the list who has the disorder has difficulty reading lowercase letters.

SO FOR HER MANY PEOPLE TYPE THEIR E-MAILS LIKE THIS. YOU HAVE BEEN CONDITIONED TO SEE THIS AS SHOUTING. I WAS CONDITIONED THAT WAY TOO. BUT I HAVE SINCE LEARNED TO SEE THIS AS HELPING FRIENDS COMMUNICATE.

Simply because someone is conditioned differently from you, and has a different contextual interpretation of all caps, hardly makes them stupid. Unaware of your custom, sure. But I presume you were equally unaware of the custom of using all caps as a way to help people with disabilities read text on a screen better and more fully participate in online communities...UNTIL NOW.

Re:Stupid? Really?

[icebraining]

Browsers and email clients have this things called "text zoom" or "text size", people don't need to type in all caps. And multiple studies since 1914 have proven that lower caps are more readable than all caps.

Re:Stupid? Really?

[natehoy]

If caps are the only thing she can read easily, wouldn't it be easier for her to load a font that shows lowercase letters as uppercase, that way she can read everything on the Web, not just the things that others have to accommodate her for? I'm not saying that accommodating her is wrong, but merely accommodating her on a specific forum means you're limiting her access to the Web. Enabling her with a font that translates everything to uppercase gives her the freedom to go anywhere she damn well pleases and the whole web is open to her (well, except for things like PDF documents or text-as-an-image, but at least most of the Web instantly becomes uppercase for her).

http://www.fontspace.com/john-singer/tymeslittlecaps would seem to be a good candidate, as it shows everything in caps, but the "lowercase" letters are just smaller capitalized letters. So she can tell the visual difference between caps and lowercase, but she's reading it all in caps.

Or if the size differences are part of the confusion, http://www.fontspace.com/typophil/tpf-quackery or http://www.fontspace.com/anonymous-fonts/juggernaut might work, Juggernaut has a squared-off blockier look that might be even easier to interpret (or not, but that's the beauty of free fonts, you try until you find one that works).

There are tons and tons of sites with free fonts, both for artistic merit and to meet the specific needs of people who have trouble with Arial and Times New Roman and the like.

Re:Stupid? Really?

[TheCarp]

I think that, if you were looking for a general rule about people to take from peoples attitudes on this, the corollary would be "the more pointless the job, the more seriously some people will take it".

People like their conditioning, and hate to admit that it is just that. What I see is reality damnit... and my mental map is the territory. How could you possibly type in ALL CAPS and not be YELLING! Thats just daft. Afterall, some dude, 15 years ago, told me that typing in all caps was like yelling.... HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN WRONG THIS WHOLE TIME! Nope! Can't be... YOU must CLEARLY be wrong!

Did I mention that this makes you the asshole for trying to malign my good name by saying that I have been wrong all these years? Asshole. Whats next, are you going to tell me that you are not a fan of my favorite sports team? Cuz them would be fighting words.

-Steve

Re:Stupid? Really?

[killmenow]

Regardless of what is more readable for the general population, a person born with a genetic condition that causes visuospatial processing difficulties and developmental delays often means said person is treated as unteachable and may never even learn to recognize lowercase letters in the first place.

Besides, your suggestion while seemingly viable and sensical, as well as natehoy's suggestion below to load different fonts, are doing two things wrong: (1) assuming others are just like you and access the internet the same way on the same devices which is an incorrect assumption. In this particular case, some of the people on the list use specialized equipment that is easier for them to operate that are not Firefox or Chrome or whatever and do not always support such web site zoom features in a usable/readable fashion or loading fonts, etc., and (2) placing the burden for this issue into the hands of the person least capable of understanding how to resolve the issue. It is trivial for the members of the list who may have previously seen all caps as shouting to simply realize all caps works better there and doesn't mean shouting in that context. It's less trivial for the people who can't even recognize all the lowercase letters of the alphabet to understand technology enough to implement a work around.

I appreciate the ideas people are coming up with and providing feedback to try and fit others into their mode of operation. But I'm suggesting maybe instead of trying to make the rest of the world fit into our preconceived notions of netiquette, we get over ourselves and realize maybe it's our perceptions that are in need of adjusting.

Re:Stupid? Really?

[killmenow]

If I had any mod points (and hadn't already commented) I'd mod you Funny.

Re:Stupid? Really?

[Endo13]

One of the main reasons for using all-caps is adding emphasis, since like forever. This isn't something new that we've just recently been "conditioned" for. So yes, a post in all-caps IS the online equivalent of yelling. That is reality. Whether you like it or not.

Re:Stupid? Really?

[timster]

That's kind of odd, since uppercase letters are all similar to each other, and harder to distinguish (custom isn't the only reason people hate them). The only advantage of uppercase letters is that they are mostly slightly larger. Using all caps may be easier, but simply using a larger font size may be more effective.

Re:Stupid? Really?

[LandDolphin]

That's f*cking stupid, and you're f*cking stupid for writing it.

Many have been conditioned to see that statement as rude or offensive. Simply because someone is conditioned differently from you hardly makes them rude or offensive.

Re:Stupid? Really?

[Stevecrox]

Chill man, I got your point there's no need to shout.

Re:Stupid? Really?

[shutdown -p now]

In this particular case, some of the people on the list use specialized equipment that is easier for them to operate that are not Firefox or Chrome or whatever and do not always support such web site zoom features in a usable/readable fashion or loading fonts, etc.

If the people are using specialized equipment that is supposed to be more accessible to them, then why doesn't it include the features that are so important to accessibility? It sounds like it should be a complaint directed at the equipment manufacturer.

placing the burden for this issue into the hands of the person least capable of understanding how to resolve the issue. It is trivial for the members of the list who may have previously seen all caps as shouting to simply realize all caps works better there and doesn't mean shouting in that context. It's less trivial for the people who can't even recognize all the lowercase letters of the alphabet to understand technology enough to implement a work around.

It's placing the burden on the side where it is most appropriate. It does not mean that people should be able to deal with the technicalities. It does mean that their computers should be set up in such a way that it all Just Works to them, and the rest of us can get on with our lives.

I appreciate the ideas people are coming up with and providing feedback to try and fit others into their mode of operation. But I'm suggesting maybe instead of trying to make the rest of the world fit into our preconceived notions of netiquette, we get over ourselves and realize maybe it's our perceptions that are in need of adjusting.

Netiquette is what "the rest of the world" is using. A few people with disabilities that have to use caps for normal communication are not "the rest of the world", they are a minority group with special needs. So long as those needs are adequately attended by someone, it is definitely overkill to ask anyone and everyone to do so. In this case, the people who need to read or post in all caps, and are unable to procure software that can do the translation itself, should simply stay away from Chrome OS netbooks. The rest of us can enjoy a slightly better keyboard layout.

Re:Stupid? Really?

[Neil Boekend]

You have also been conditioned to a produce a certain sound when reading "A" aloud. This doesn't mean its not the way it should be.

All caps = yelling has been assumed for a long time by enough people to say it should be assumed by everyone*
Besides, someone with dyslexia has difficulties reading all caps text. Most people with dyslexia read words, not letters. Words are defined by their shape, things as length, pieces sticking out (up or down, like the "p" and the "d" but not the "a"). Caps remove these features and forces them to revert to "letter" reading, which is painstakingly slow.

*this does not apply to most things. Only conventions like this.

Typical Geek Mentality

[dahl_ag]

I don't have a need for a CapsLock. And if I (in my geeky prowess) can't think of any reason that someone would want one, there can't possibly be a legitimate need for one. Get rid of it now!

Re:Typical Geek Mentality

[DragonWriter]

I don't have a need for a CapsLock. And if I (in my geeky prowess) can't think of any reason that someone would want one, there can't possibly be a legitimate need for one. Get rid of it now!

You know, if they took away the key or the functionality rather than just changing the default functionality of the key to something they expect to be more commonly used on Chrome OS than Caps Lock with an easy option to change it back for those who needs Caps Lock, you might have a point.

Re:Typical Geek Mentality

[dahl_ag]

Yeah, my frustration was more in response to some of the other comments. Reminded me of similar attitudes that I see on other tech forums. Like the kind of thing where someone asks how to do something in language X and the responses are that language X is dead and useless and that they should be using language Y instead. If you don't know the answer to the question, there is no need to reply. If you can't imagine why someone is STILL using language X, it doesn't mean that there isn't a legitimate reason.

Choice

[firewrought]

Taking away choice from people is not good.

What a naieve view! Consider:

• Eliminating one choice may introduce new, more meaningful choices.
• Eliminating a choice may be a beneficial design trade-off that makes the system/product better in some other respect.
• Irrelevant and overabundant choices tend to be psychologically overwhelming. Eliminating or hiding such choices tends to have a liberating effect on the end user.

Perhaps the commentator is subconsciously equating choice with flexibility, freedom, or power. Sometimes that's the case and sometimes choices actually work to hinder such things. If you're designing for the good of your users, seek to understand their wants, needs, and capabilities and then optimize your product to serve and most easily enable the range of choices they are actually seeking make.

Apparently, Google is doing this as the caps lock key is now a search key that you can optionally revert to caps lock behavior if you need it.

Re:By Accident

[camperdave]

Actually, I'd capslock and hold the shift for the underscores. Less error prone that way.

but...

[billmarrs]

I need my capslock key! I redefined it to be my pause/play button!
And, don't take away my "windows" key, I use that for "next song".

Sun Workstation Keyboards

[Arakageeta]

I remember having trouble using the old Sun workstation keyboards. The Control and Caps Lock keys are in switched positions. I suppose that makes some sense on a UNIX system, but it was hard getting used to. Maybe Google should just move Caps Lock somewhere else?

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[Anonymous Coward]

You plan to do a lot of CAD work on a 12" netbook?

Using CAPS-LOCK as a SHIFT key..

[jimbob666]

I had to help a user here who couldn't log in because he used CAPS-LOCK as a SHIFT key when entering his password.

Seriously, we had to see it with our own eyes when we couldn't get his account working via phone.

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[Cassini2]

Caps Lock is required for any shop floor industrial work. CNC lathes and CNC mills require Caps Lock. Fanuc CNC controls only use upper case ASCII characters. If lower case is used, even in a comment, the Fanuc controls will display error messages. (I lost a bet on this once.)

Some of the convention for using upper case letters comes from the fact that upper case is much more readable in a restricted environment. Upper case only is quicker to key in, too. There is no need to use the shift key, which is a big savings on the shop floor. As such, Allen Bradley PLCs routinely have upper case variable names. Almost any CNC control that uses G-Code uses upper case. Drafting conventions also specify all upper case for dimensioning, too. AutoCAD worked in upper case only.

In modern times, the new convention appears to be lower case only. "i see students omitting all capitalization and punctuation in essays" The old upper case only convention improved readability at a time when computers were not so flexible.

Re:By Accident

[RevWaldo]

I prefer to use it when filling out forms - name, shipping address, that sort of thing.

.

ABSURD!

[Technomonics]

When I enter a mailing address, I want the deliver to go without a hitch so I generally enter the address all in CAPS. To consider that the CAPSLOCK key is only used to SHOUT is the most assinine thing since the DOT dot-head decided that technology to disable cell phones in cars wouldbe a great thing to do. Throw the baby out with the bath water is what seems to prevail. Are there any original thinkers left or do people just come up with knee-jerk reactions and feel all good about themselves for saving the WORLD from ourselves? Reminds me of the movie Idiocracy where they use used a "electrolyte-enhanced" prioduct instead of water because "Brawndo" is better than just plain water. DOH! Life imitating art. We only have ourselves though to blame if this type of thinking overwhelms us and we become complacant to just accept things rather than put up a fuss. "Eternal Vigilance Is The Price Of Freedom" and it equally applies to technology. We must "Protect Our Tech" and "Demand Quality." Yeah, this is a different rant but goes along the same lines of this conversation- When did we decide it was acceptable that our consumer products such as televisions should have a life expectancy of less than ten years? When growing up, my television lasted over 25 years, yet we have allowed the manufacturers to chepaen the quality to the point where it becomes necessary to buy an "extended one year warranty" to cover us a full two years on some equipment. GAHH!!!

But it's my mod key..

[formfeed]

I have CapsLock setup as a second Right-Alt, so I have a modifier key on either hand.

Wonderful thing, a second layer without horrible finger acrobatics. And you can put anything you need on that layer
ößé©@倮ø

Re:By Accident

[Quirkz]

Wow. That's a fantastic example of a coder "being smart" in a really dumb way. In most languages converting a string to lower is a matter of a simple built-in function. All of 10 or 15 extra characters to just convert and all is good. That's an incredibly stupid error message, and that programmer deserves to be kicked in the shins.

Theft!!!

[Rooked_One]

I'm sure Apple has already put a patent on this "technology."

Re:By Accident

[Ephemeriis]

I'm not sure I have ever pressed the Caps Lock key on purpose... Anyone?

I use it to toggle running in a lot of games.

At work, I have to type in ALL CAPS for our EMR software.

But for general usage... Nah. I don't need that many capital letters at one time.

This is only speculation...

[JayRott]

But if you look at they keyboard it has a led to indicate shift. I have to assume it is there to indicate a caps lock function, perhaps by using a double shift or some type of keyboard shortcut. I doubt they would put a led indicator there only to have it light when you press the shift key. I could be wrong though, dumber things have happened.

I just map the bloody thing to something else.

[EMR]

I loath the caps lock key.. it is a completely useless key on the keyboard.. It was useful back in the old typewriter days when it was first created due to the "mechanics" of things.. but nowdays? it is an annoyance.

All my systems have the caps lock key remapped to something else.. Usually the super key, especially on my "old" keyboards that pre-date the addition of the super keys (commonly known to Windows users as the Windows key, or the Command key to Mac users)

Re:Whooooosh!

[entotre]

The "capitals" reply might have been a joke that went over YOUR head. Ironically, such jokes are called deadpans.

It's only for the Chrome netbook, ffs

[FlashBuster3000]

I don't get why so many people complain.
It's only on the Chrome netbook.
You won't use legacy decades old applications on it.
You won't even have a terminal.
You will just browse the web.
You will far often want to search the web (and press that new key) then you want to write lots of letters all in caps,
which you still can with shift.
So, yes. Get rid of that useless key, please!

Some people use keyboards for actual writing

[hlovy]

Typical how computer geeks believe they are the center of the world. There are some of us who use computer keyboards for reasons other than programming and posting things to blogs and bulletin boards. Some people use computer keyboards for actual writing of the English language and, in the case of acronyms, could really use that caps-lock key.

Re:Some people use keyboards for actual writing

[DragonWriter]

Some people use computer keyboards for actual writing of the English language and, in the case of acronyms, could really use that caps-lock key.

As someone who uses a computer keyboard for acronym-heavy writing in the English language more than I would like, I'd have to say that for acronyms (or single-word all caps), Shift is far superior to Caps Lock, but, in any cases, its irrelevant, since Google Chrome OS still has the key traditionally used for Caps Lock in its normal position and, even though the default function under Chrome OS is as a Search hotkey, there is an easy to access setting to change it to Caps Lock if that's what you need.

This is all a bunch of whining (or, in some cases, cheering) over something that is completely misrepresented in TFA.

Very true ....

[King_TJ]

But frankly, some of those systems, while very arguably "ugly", are anything BUT inefficient!

I work for a place that's stuck using one such app, and as much as I disliked it when I first started working here as network admin, I've come to realize the simplicity has many huge benefits too. For example, even when our bandwidth is saturated, that app keeps working pretty smoothly when it has to be accessed from our second location. The simple, all-text menus transfer easily even over very slow connections. Additionally, our salespeople who have used it for years can fly through the software using function keys and digits that select menu choices, pretty much in their sleep. When you watch them doing it while talking on the phone with a customer, you realize there's no way you can design a modern GUI based point-and-click app that could keep up as well. It's not nearly as user-friendly for a new user to learn, but we're not exactly a "revolving door" of sales and office staff, so years of greater efficiency for long-timers is worth a lot more than a longer initial training period for someone new.

Caps Lock: Dunsel

[Cajun Hell]

Those of us who use it sparingly or for specialized reasons will be deprived of it.

If you really use it sparingly, you won't miss it. You'll hold down shift for an extra 4 seconds per week.

While their explanation about it improving comments is obviously bullshit, I like the decision anyway. Every single time I ever press caps lock, it's an accident.

If I may get overdramatic, having a caps lock key on your keyboard, is like having a bear trap on your desk. As long as you stay away from it, it's harmless. But it never under any circumstances ever ever helps you, and sometimes you accidently go near it.

Re:Caps Lock: Dunsel

[mcmonkey]

If you really use it sparingly, you won't miss it. You'll hold down shift for an extra 4 seconds per week.

While their explanation about it improving comments is obviously bullshit, I like the decision anyway. Every single time I ever press caps lock, it's an accident.

If I may get overdramatic, having a caps lock key on your keyboard, is like having a bear trap on your desk. As long as you stay away from it, it's harmless. But it never under any circumstances ever ever helps you, and sometimes you accidently go near it.

Like the fire department. You only use that sparingly, right?

Having a caps lock key is like having a bear trap on your desk, if you work in an office with the occasional bear.

Most of the time it sits there taking up space. But when you use it, it's the right tool for the job.

Re:Caps Lock: Dunsel

[Omestes]

When I was young, I used to just yank it off my keyboard every time I got a new one. I had a small bin of them sitting around until a friend needed them for an art project (I went through a ton of keyboards since I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and later a very stiff IBM keyboard, I've cracked space-bars in half). Later I've just disabled them in software.

On this current keyboard, I don't think I have ever actually used caps-lock. On the rare occasion that I need to type a long string of caps, I hold down shift. I would actually find a keyboard without a caps-lock key to be a very nice thing. The last time I used my capslock key was on an old mac, where the tab key broke and I had to remap the caps-lock key to tab.

Re:Caps Lock: Dunsel

[ogl_codemonkey]

I touch-type, and don't use caps lock at all; so I map it to a second ctrl key - this matches the layout of the PowerBook I first discovered Emacs on (purchased in Japan), so it's pretty hard-wired in my command reflexes.

There's a convenient enough way to do so on every OS I've used since I read about it somewhere and thought I'd give it a try. OS X (at least Leopard and Snow Leopard), Windows (at least XP and Vista), and Fedora 10 onwards.

The exception to this rule is that my last workplace would keep overwriting the setting, with the admin muttering something about "shouldn't be messing with the registry anyway" - so rather than try to explain, justify, and force the issue; I pried the key cap off. Not doing anything is better than doing the wrong thing, at least in this case.

Having a caps lock key is like having a bear trap on your desk, if you work in an office with the occasional bear.

Most of the time it sits there taking up space. But when you use it, it's the right tool for the job.

Probably just my lack of sleep, but I first read this as 'like having a beer tap on your desk' - possibly an even better analogy for your point ;)

WAIT, WHAT?!

[human-cyborg]

HOW DOES TAKING AWAY THE CAPS LOCK PREVENT LEAVING COMMENTS IN ALL CAPS?

(WRITTEN WITHOUT USING THE CAPS LOCK KEY> (damn))

However, I can see how using an auto-caps mechanism would improve the quality of comments. Perhaps an auto-grammar and auto-don't-be-an-ass mechanism too while they're at it.

(Again, written without using the caps lock key.)

Since we're not all in steno-pools using typewriters to create paper-based forms anymore, perhaps it is time to retire the Caps Lock.

Re:By Accident

[Cajun Hell]

Never. It's an accident, 100.000% of the time.

Choice?

[Domini]

There are many other "choices" (to be idiots too) that have been taken away proactively. (Like the smiley key! Surely you bemoan the loss of that one too?)

Nay, I say good riddance... people still have the choice to type in all uppercase... it's called "holding in the SHIFT key" (see what I did there?) :) -- smiley typed with ':' and ')' keys...

Re:By Accident

[SleazyRidr]

Quite often yes.

Sometimes I use my computer for tasks other than posting to /.

Re:By Accident

[kent_eh]

I have a bunch of hardware at work that I connect to on a daily basis that requires commands (and even the login) in upper case.
So, yeah, I use it a lot.

That said, the Caps-Lock key could be a lot smaller, or in a different place on the keyboard and solve a lot of problems.

Re:Holding a key and typing with one hand is awkwa

[Farmer Tim]

I type with one hand.

Too much information right there.

Give it a week...

[HikingStick]

It should only take a week for someone to write an app that will intercept text input and REPLACE ALL TYPED CHARACTERS WITH CAPITAL LETTERS!

And are they going to be using the ChromeOS?

[Arrepiadd]

And we can all safely assume none of those will be using a new laptop designed to be used on a pilot program to test a new operating system, or not?

Re:Should be a modifier

[fishbowl]

Why haven't you remapped your capslock to ctrl? You *have* your wish. Those of us who cut our teeth on Sun keyboards tend to think of Caps Lock as a Ctrl anyway.

Good!

[fsck!]

I started remapping my capslock key to escape over two years ago and never looked back. By my estimation, my pinky will have travelled a bazillion miles less by the time I retire (vim user here) than if I left escape at the top left extent of my keyboard.

My blog has instructions on doing this in Linux, Mac OSX and Windows.

http://blog.jacobelder.com/2008/04/take-back-your-keyboard.html

I WOULD HAVE HAD FIRST POST.....

[tjhayes]

IF I HAD A CAPS LOCK KEY :)

Am I the only one who noticed?

[tycoex]

There is an indicator light on the Shift key. Double press shift and it lights up. AKA Caps Lock.

RIP and Good Riddance to the caps lock key

[erroneus]

I just hope this catches on. I hope one day we see a keyboard with "CAPS LOCK" and people wonder "What the heck is that?!" It definitely needs to go away as the keyboard real-estate is better used for other functions.

If one wants to have a "Caps Lock" function, I propose pressing both Shift keys simultaneously as the method for making that happen. I know... one-handed typers might have issue with the removal of the caps lock. For them, I propose a "slide" switch that literally latches the shift key into the down position. But then again, people who type one-handed or literally only have one hand probably already have means and methods that do not use the caps lock key. Windows, for example, has an annoying accessibility feature that is enabled by pressing and holding Shift for too long.

In any case, Caps Lock is a needless key. I use it only to test to see if a machine is locked up at a very low level. (If the caps lock, scroll lock and num lock lights do not toggle, then a machine is truly brain dead and probably needs to be cold started... not always but most of the time it's the case.)

I use mine for plain old typing

[sean.peters]

My work involves the typing of a lot of acronyms... which I sometimes do on Google docs. The lack of a capslock key would make my (work) life almost indescribably painful. Accordingly, I won't be buying a Chrome notebook.

Re:I use mine for plain old typing

[siride]

It has a way to do capslock with the shift key by double tapping. But seriously, it's really not that hard to type acronyms with the shift key unless you have some sort of physical disorder with your hands. As I said in another post, I use SQL a lot and use the shift key instead of annoying caps lock to type in the keywords. It doesn't slow down my typing and I actually feel like I have finer-grained control over when I capitalize or not since it's a matter of simply lifting my right pinky off the shift key rather than sending a finger out to caps lock to turn it off again.

no cool cruisecontrol?

[polle404]

I DON'T GET IT! WHY!!!?

more seriously, apart from the fact that no IT professional would want to use the machine or OS, this is daft to the point of idiocy.

It's fixing one of the side-effects, not the disease or even the symptoms.

Re:By Accident

[rubycodez]

sure, for constant and macro names, I just wish the underscore/dash key would be shifted too. also for long runs of SQL keywords (not required by dbms but by coding standards). From time to time I have to make COBOL text files when dealing with legacy applications, again by convention

Amen, brother

[sean.peters]

I would barely be able to function without capslock.

CAPS KEY LOCKOUT!

[defaria]

I use to have so much fun when working in a Unix lab where engineers would physically yank the caps lock key out of the keyboard lest they might accidently hit it. When they were away from their desks and their screen lock came on I'd take a pencil and stick it gently into the removed caps lock key thus activating all caps. It would take them hours to unlock their screen! ;-) Ah the good old days...

I try to imagine it...

[sourcerror]

So when you're designing the ROTFLcopter you can write "CROSS-SECTION!!!!1111".

Re:By Accident

[icebraining]

isn't the former actually more lines of code than just accepting lower or uppercase letters?

Yes. Even in C you just need two simple lines to convert the whole string to uppercase.

Re:It's not losing Caps Lock that I'm worried abou

[QuantumBeep]

Only a few isolated things actually change capslock, including some very silly Winamp plugins that blink the lights.

The problem is that it does happen on occasion, and when it does, you are stuck that way (this keyboard is probably not going to be paired with Microsoft Windows).

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[Chrisq]

Caps Lock is required for any shop floor industrial work. CNC lathes and CNC mills require Caps Lock. Fanuc CNC controls only use upper case ASCII characters. If lower case is used, even in a comment, the Fanuc controls will display error messages. (I lost a bet on this once.)

I am sure that it would not be beyond the wit of most programmers to write a parser so that any commands passed to the lathe device are changed to upper case.

Good idea, poor execution

[Peter Simpson]

+1 for the attempt to get rid of ALL CAPS POSTS, but a better way to do it would have been to modify the keyboard driver to have the caps lock key *not* change the case of the text being entered. Make it a configurable option, but default it to "off".

Re:Holding a key and typing with one hand is awkwa

[Chrisq]

I type with one hand.

Too much information right there.

His boyfriend won't let him have the other hand back for a couple of minutes.

Re:By Accident

[icebraining]

A search key actually seems useful. I use a key combo, but most people probably wouldn't remember it unless it's right there shouting at them.

Re:By Accident

[m.ducharme]

I use it constantly in creating legal documents. Of course, one uses a lot of pre-made precedents in creating documents, but the stuff that's always capitalized is usually the stuff that needs to be written fresh for new documents, i.e. names of parties, place names, etc.

Re:By Accident

[pthisis]

But programming editors autocomplete symbols for you, so you rarely type the whole thing out. And with all the underscores, it's just as easy to hold the shift key and type.

Programmers are the most likely bunch of people to pop the capslock key off of the keyboard entirely, in my experience.

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[coolmadsi]

There have been a lot of programs mentioned so far that may require a caps lock key

Considering the Chrome OS is basically a browser, I think I better question might be "Does anyone actually use it legitimately while browsing the internet"?

Computer Aided Drafting

[KarrottoP]

For anyone working in the Computer Aided Drafting field this 'innovation' would be cause a major problem. Industry standards require all text to be caps only on architectural and engineering drawings.

Implement capslock in software

[DrXym]

I hope they intend to provide another way to enable all caps. For example in Android you double tap shift to enable all caps. That might be a reasonable compromise, which saves a small bit of keyboard space without removing functionality which is useful and sometimes vital.

Re:By Accident

[Calydor]

That could get annoying fast. I've disabled the 'smart keys' in Windows because I have a stupid tendency to either hold down Shift while thinking of how to open a new line, or tap it several times if I can't decide between multiple choices. To finally start writing and then have to backspace, double-tap and start over would be a very, very annoying 'feature'.

Trying to make a new Caps Lock is reinventing the wheel to see if a 100-sided polygon would get better friction. There's no need, the wheel works the way it does and it's second nature to the vast majority of anyone who uses it already.

What do you use it for?

[SvnLyrBrto]

Honest question there...

What legitimate, sparing, or specialized use do you actually put caps lock to use for? Personally, I hate the stupid thing and I say good riddance to bad rubbish. One of the first things I do whenever I'm setting up a new computer is remap the thing to be a control key, as was always the proper use for the key in that space.

I do agree that aol-ers will always find some way to be stupid and annoying. Too bad no one ever thought to just drop all traffic from their netblock.

Re:What do you use it for?

[DrgnDancer]

SQL statements are traditionally typed in all caps. At any rate the command portions are, references to the actual database structure are lower case. So you get statement that look like "SELECT first_name FROM users WHERE last_name = 'Smith';" to print out the first name of everyone in the table "users" who has a last name "Smith". Frankly there's about a million theories as to the easiest way to produce theses irritating as Hell to type statements, but caps lock figures in a lot of them.

Re:What do you use it for?

[suutar]

My main use for capslock is typing long names of constant values (which our programming guidelines say should be all-caps). I'm a lot faster typing normally with capslock than trying to type while one finger is holding down shift...

Oblig

[sirrunsalot]

The site is down so here's a cached version.

You kids get off my LAWN!

[RedHat Rocky]

Ya dang young'ens.

First you took my L-shaped enter key, then my Big Old Backspace. And moved my pipe key to the stupidest place ever.

Change, I'm agin it! *spit*

Re:By Accident

[dr2chase]

No, no, you're supposed to SMITE (damn, did that without capslock, just now noticed) the users. Don't smite them, they start to get all uppity, filing bug reports about crappy UI and stuff like that. It's a privilege to use that software, you should be grateful they wrote it.

And besides, smiting is so much fun.

Uhh, what the hell?

[John Pfeiffer]

Geez. I don't even USE the Caps Lock to type all-caps, I just hold the Left-Shift down with my pinky finger. I _DO_ however, use the Caps Lock to switch between Katakana, Hiragana, and direct input modes in the Japanese IME. That's pretty damned important. :(

Besides, like many have pointed out, douchebags and fucktards are going to be douchebags and fucktards even if they have to communicate their douchebaggery and fucktardery by writing it on the wall in their own blood. Though, actually, that's not a bad idea, especially for the more long-winded ones...

Re:By Accident

[h4rr4r]

I do it all the time, I have it mapped to Ctrl so I can make my IBM type M have the correct layout.

The better not touch the NumLock key!

[RevWaldo]

A NumLock key on a laptop/netbook is absolutely essential! Who doesn't need a virtual keypad right in the middle of the keyboard?

Sarcasm of course. Not gonna name any names (ThinkPad) but I've had to deal laptops that had the NumLock turning on by default during boot up and users unable to login, thinking either the keyboard was broken or something was wrong with their password. Most don't even know NumLock on a laptop is an option, much less notice the eensy-weensy LED indicating its on or what it means. And we couldn't get it to stop, BIOS or registry changes be damned. One laptop even had its keyboard replaced (not by me.)

The eventual fix: Boot up laptop, don't log in, turn off the NumLock, power down, start back up as usual, bash head against wall.

.

RAGE MODE

[UtterCoward]

ENGAGED!!!!!!!

One handed typists?

[flyingfsck]

If Google drops the Caps Lock, then they will likely get sued by some accessibility freak, the War Amps or a veteran's organization.

Re:By Accident

[frenchbedroom]

THIS_IS_A_PREPROCESSOR_SYMBOL

Typed in no time holding the shift key with my left pinky and using the remaining 7 fingers (thumbs are only for the space bar)

Re:By Accident

[Greyfox]

Occasionally when typing names of constants and the occasional SQL. Not enough to really justify it having its own key though. It's probably something like .0001% of all the keys I've ever pressed over my lifetime.

Pinky

[choko]

My hands have built-in caps lock. It's called the pinky finger. Good riddance, caps lock key.

Active moderation and rewarding systems

[LoudMusic]

Removing caps lock might be beneficial. Figuring out how to enforce punctuation and proper spelling would be preferable to me. Perhaps a reward system for grammatically correct responses. Starting with a rather restrictive commenting system where users can only comment under certain limited conditions, twice per day, only on topics in designated groupings, only old topics, only topics with existing comments, etc, and reward good comments on a scale by reducing the limitations over time. For the most part, this can be handled by software. Bad comments of course move the user down the sliding scale.

On top of that add user-based moderation and staffed-based meta-moderation systems. Moderation doesn't have to be in real time, so long as it takes place on a daily routine.

With these systems users who make crappy comments are limited to the comments they can submit, and the moderators' work load is reduced dramatically. Users still have the freedom to post "UR A TULE DYRTBAG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!", but when they do their ability to post again anytime soon is dramatically reduced. Perhaps the moderators are automatically notified of a 'bad comment' and can quickly review all comments by that user to meta-moderate their scoring.

The user-based moderators could be anonymous and periodically changing, similar to Slashdot, and require multiple users to make the same or similar moderation changes to individual comment before it takes effect. That way it's like jury peer review, and it's more difficult for a group of users or a piece of software to hijack the system.

Re:Active moderation and rewarding systems

[geekoid]

Absolutely correct. We should work hard to keep the poor an uneducated, and dirty foreigner from participating on the internet~ That will teach them~

Good thinking.

Maybe we can start with you?
"Perhaps a reward system for grammatically correct responses. "

Tsk tsk,. No internet for a week for you!
Now, if we could couple your idea with a way to keep people who post ideas without thinking off the internet, we would never hear another one of your stupid ideas again. If that prevent sarcasm, then I'm doomed.

Re:Active moderation and rewarding systems

[LoudMusic]

You use yahoo for mail. All your points are invalid.

Re:By Accident

[dzfoo]

Sure, for the namby pamby "programmers" who use IDEs with auto-complete. What about those who either do not use auto-complete features, or use editors that do not have them?

    -dZ.

Re:Holding a key and typing with one hand is awkwa

[Farmer Tim]

Too much is never enough, eh?

bigger letters

[chocolatetrumpet]

My coworker prefers all capital letters. He can read them more easily because capital letters are bigger.

We work at a small law firm and use a lot of old fixed resolution software.

CAPS LOCK = early warning system

[SuperDry]

Taking away caps lock would remove an important early warning system for stupid posts. Right now, if I see a post that's in all caps, I can immediately know that the content is stupid without even reading a word of it, and just skip over it and use my time for something worth reading.

Re:CAPS LOCK = early warning system

[jamessnell]

I second this motion.

Make up your mind

[leamanc]

The submitter says:

I'm not a fan of the caps lock key myself...it can go to hell, for all I'm concerned.

But in the very same breath says:

But taking away choice from people is not good, especially when this is not going to improve the quality of comments.

Dude, make up your mind! If you want it to go to hell, you should be happy that somebody has taken a stand and done it for you. That last sentence is clearly troll-bait aimed at getting people riled up that such a major player as Google is taking away "people's choice."

Re:By Accident

[apoc.famine]

Um, so once you hit it, you leave it on? I usually turn it off afterwards...

I'm guessing you want "It's an accident, 50.000% of the time".

That said, other than laptops, any keyboard I use regularly has the caps lock key pulled off and tossed into a drawer. I'm a bit more hesitant to do it with laptops, as if I break anything, it's a *lot* harder to replace.

I'm ok, You're ok

[somejeff]

As long as they don't get rid of the SysRq key. I use it everyday during lunch, staring at it, feeling old and depressed.

Come to think of it, the SysRq key should be replaced with the Boss Key. (And we wouldn't have to change the function either.)

Re:By Accident

[h4rr4r]

You would think they would be computer savvy enough to remap it instead.

Re:Should be a modifier

[SuurMyy]

I get äöøåøæðüÐ, etc using caps lock as an extra modifier key. Consult the nearest xmodmap-file near to you..

No choices lost

[OrangeTide]

But taking away choice from people is not good

1. Then don't buy it, you have a choice to use a PC instead
2. You can hold the SHIFT key to type in caps, it will improve your dexterity if you do it enough.
3. There will probably be an App for that.

Re:No choices lost

[geekoid]

It's a lost choice for the people who have one. well, not really in this case(see below) , but your item 1 is a false premise.

No, holding the SHIFT key won't

There is an option to switch it.

Re:No choices lost

[OrangeTide]

How is it a false premise. The right to select if you participate is pretty fundamental and often overlooked in the tech community.

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[gnapster]

Seems like a waste of a good keyboard key spot, they should invent something more useful for that location...

They have done so. It is being used for the search function. They have mapped it to Google's strongest suit.

VIM style shortcuts

[jaitropmange]

On Windows I made an AutoHotkey script where CapsLock allows me to use VIM type key commands EVERYWHERE! Try it.

Slashdotters should be intimately familiar with

[Dachannien]

the concept:

LAMENESS FILTER

Re:Can someone explain...

[ChefInnocent]

Even better (for you), have you looked at chorded keyboards? I think those are exactly what you are looking for.

TFA is wrong

[DragonWriter]

They are going to eliminate the Caps Lock key from all the notebooks made for that operating system. Why? Because they know better and we are all idiots.

The Chrome notebooks have a search key in the spot in which Caps Lock traditionally resides, but include an option to switch the function to Caps Lock instead of search. (source (also links to and has shot from Google's Chrome OS introduction.)

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[EvilBudMan]

I'm a CAD guy to and the program I have has an ALL CAPS command and other features where you can format the text as you wish.

Nothing is being taken away

[DragonWriter]

I don't necessarily think they should take the option away.

They aren't taking the option away. They are setting the default function of the key to "Search" and providing a well-documented, simple settings option to change the function of the key between "Search" and "Caps Lock".

If you can't live without Caps Lock, you can keep the key function set to that and just not have a quick-key for Search.

Huge pain to change a simple setting?

[DragonWriter]

I code in a case sensitive language and use case to indicate different data types. This would be a huge pain!

It would be a huge pain to use the choice built into the OS by going to the settings menu and change the modifier key function to "Caps Lock" instead of "Search"?

Oh noes!

Re:By Accident

[doogledog]

Two lines?

if(1)
    strupr(mystr);

Is that what you meant?

Buy the right tool for the job.

[couchslug]

The notebook is intended as a cheap communication device, not a professional work tool.

Those needing something different can buy something different, which is why they make some things different.

NOT AS STUPID AS YOU THINK

[DragonWriter]

DOES GOOGLE NOT HAVE ANY DBA'S WORKING FOR THEM?

I assume that any Google DBA's or SQL programmers that edit code using Chrome OS notebooks and need caps lock functionality more than they need a Search quick-key while doing so are expected to be competent enough to go to the Settings menu and select the appropriate option to set the function of the modifier key to Caps Lock instead of Search.

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[minasoko]

I've not used Numlock or Pause/Break for ages, though.

If you work in Microsoft-world, Win+Pause/Break is shortcut for System Properties. Quite handy.

Do THIS

[jamessnell]

The problem as I see is that often users (like my mom) will experience great grief as they mash their keyboards frantically - enabling their caps lock without really noticing. Whereas users who know how to use the thing often don't because, WHO THE HELL TALKS LIKE THIS?

I suggest a GREAT solution! Re-purpose the "caps lock" key for something useful and assign "keyboard gestures" to keys.. I suggest that one of the shift keys be altered, to, by convention, upon being "double clicked" (or maybe triple or held for a long time, etc), it will enable a caps-lock, and the effect "fades off" after inactivity. Have an LED continue to indicate the state of the "key".

I provide this idea free for all to use and implement. So, Microsoft, Apple or whomever that wants to retro-actively patent this idea, can SHOVE IT for trying to continue to abuse the nature of the patent system. This is a free, open idea. That said, it would be nice to get verbal credit or something. But really, just do this (and variants for other barely-used keys) and let's move on!

Re:By Accident

[burisch_research]

In my experience, it's the POWER button that's likely to suffer from attrition in this way. Until I removed the keycap from my power/sleep button, it had caused me untold grief. Caps Lock is a minor demon.

Taking away nothing

[DragonWriter]

I don't have a problem with them taking away the functionality of the Caps Lock key, but I do have a problem if they take the actual physical key away.

They aren't taking away either the functionality or the key; the default functionality of the key under Chrome OS is as a search quick key, but a simple setting change makes it a Caps Lock key.

ChromeOS addresses the need simply

[DragonWriter]

And we can all safely assume none of those will be using a new laptop designed to be used on a pilot program to test a new operating system, or not?

Even if they do, I suspect that the fact that the new operating systems includes a simple option in the Settings menu to configure the Search key back to function as a Caps Lock key will deal with any difficulties quite well.

Clearly if you don't use it no one does

[geekoid]

moron.

I use it regularly when dealing with Mainframe commands.

Also, I don't thinking caps really mean shouting to most people anymore. It's used for emphasis.

Choice... Just Like Insert Key Nuked in MS Office

[Volvogga]

That really threw me, but very few people seemed to care about that one (lots of people actually rejoiced over it). I personally like being able to jump into overtype mode. I know for sure that my formatting is going to be uniform that way when I re-use a document for its formatting. Now if MS put in a 'Reveal Codes' function like WordPerfect, then they can throw insert right out the window if they want (Reveal Formatting isn't anywhere near as nice in my opinion).

Anyway, I have a feeling that the elimination of Caps Lock would go over about the same. The vast majority wouldn't care, and the loudest voices on the subject will probably be applauding.

Re:It's a dealbreaker

[Khyber]

Ahem, PROPER typing skills eliminate the need for a Caps Lock key.

That is why your shift keys are located next to your pinky fingers.

Not surprising you work in the defense industry.

'Quality of comments' has nothing to do with caps

[kheldan]

As of this writing there are over 550 comments on this news story -- only 4 of which are moderated up to 5 -- and Slashdot's commenting system prevents the use of excessive caps, so I call shenanigans on the whole concept.

Given their record

[wiredog]

I don't think anybody is worried about the Vikings.

Re:Agreed - But how does it feel?

[Rambo Tribble]

SQL may not show discrimination, but does that tell us how the database really feels?

Like taking away the serial port and the PS2 ports

[mauriceh]

Trust me, you will not need it and will get over it in about 2 seconds.
How about the Scroll Lock? Used that one lately too?

How about that "`" key, the one right below the "~"?

Oh, and the ever useful Windows key.

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[LynnwoodRooster]

LOL... iSeeWhatYouDidThere... But that was all SHIFT, not CAPSLOCK. My left pinkie is massive strong!

Is that supposed to be simple?

[Chemisor]

I'm a programmer, and I would have no idea how to switch the mouse buttons. I know it's probably possible, but I would definitely need to google some HOWTO document to find out. So don't just laugh at nontechnical people for not knowing obscure stuff that you only know because you've had to do it before.

Re:Is that supposed to be simple?

[similar_name]

I'm a programmer, and I would have no idea how to switch the mouse buttons.

Really?!? you wouldn't think it might be in the Control Panel. Maybe under mouse?

Re:Is that supposed to be simple?

[peterbye]

Do you also assume that every computer has a Start button?

Re:Is that supposed to be simple?

[Chemisor]

If you're running Linux without a fancy UI framework like KDE, you don't have any "control panel". It would involve writing commands into your .xinitrc like: xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1 4 5 6". And sometimes that doesn't work if you happen to have a weird mouse like Logitech mx310 where you need to follow a HOWTO that takes an hour to execute.

Re:Is that supposed to be simple?

[similar_name]

I assume the vast majority of computers have a start button, but you are right that it is a bad assumption on slashdot. I supposed one might look in preferences/mouse or control center/peripherals/mouse if they don't have a start menu.

I think my main point stands that any fairly technical person should have a decent idea of where generic UI settings are for their desktop of choice.

Re:Is that supposed to be simple?

[similar_name]

I think if you are running linux without a fancy UI you would not act surprised that the mouse buttons could be switched as the OP seemed to be commenting about his friend that wanted to be in IT.

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[Francofille]

If you consider the rest of the world as "anyone" then yes.

The azerty keyboard layout requires either shift or caps lock to make numbers. Entering numbers beyond a phone number or two is miserable without caps lock.

Additionally some programming languages and conventions use caps.

Re:By Accident

[DrgnDancer]

I have,once, from a really anal company that included both upper and lower case letters in their keys. Their keys were like 25 characters long and included upper case, lower case, numeric, and I think a few special characters. They were really, really paranoid about people stealing their software. Which was kind of ironic, because they were a pretty small company that made a mostly failed competitor to AutoCAD. By all accounts it was excellent software; but the users were a small, loyal fan base that refused to switch to the far more popular competitor and were fairly unlikely to steal licenses.

600+ comments about Caps Lock?

[JustCallMeRich]

Really?

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[darnkitten]

The software our library consortium uses does not like lower- or mixed-case in certain fields, such as patron names, Alternate IDs and *sigh* passwords.

Re:By Accident

[owlstead]

As are constants - i.e. static final class fields - in Java. I presume that there will be many more programming languages that use all caps for constants. I presume that there will be newer languages that forgo that kind of static though - any IDE or source code browser can highlight constants and such in any way the user wants.

But I don't count either C++/Java as uncool or old technologies - both languages are not in their youth anymore, but still hugely popular and are still maintained and added to. And since I even program using 10 fingers, you bet I'll use caps a lot. Especially since I strongly believe in descriptive constant values for readability (hell, I even use Byte.SIZE to shift something one octet to the left).

Re:By Accident

[alta]

Oh I forgot about that. before I found the cheats I raised my running (I think it was) by moving my char into a corner, placing something heavy just right on the keyboard, leaving the game going and then left the house for a few days. Boy was I fast when I returned.

CAPS LOCK GU BRATH

[Foochee]

I see a whole army of my slashdotters, here in defiance of tyranny. You've come to type as free men... and free men you are. What will you do with that freedom? Will you type?

Type? Against that? No! We will use the Shift Key. And we will live.

Aye, type and you may die. Use the Shift Key, and you'll live... at least a while. And typing away on your Chrome Notebook in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell Google that they may take our CAPS LOCK, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!
CAPS LOCK GU BRATH!!!

Still ticked that they replaced CTRL with Caps-Loc

[micron]

Time to abandon hope that the CTRL key will never go back to where it is supposed to be?

I just hope

[geekoid]

They sell a model where the casing is literally chrome.

Saving space? No

[DragonWriter]

It appears to me that it's very likely that the reason for omitting caps-lock is just to save space

That seems unlikely, since the key is still there.

I suspect that the reason they have set the default function of the key to be "Search" is that they believe the bulk of Chrome OS users will be better served a Search hotkey than by a rarely-used Caps Lock key, and that those for whom Caps Lock is needed will take advantage of the convenient option in the Settings menu to switch the function of the key to "Caps Lock".

Re:Saving space? No

[rockout]

Save space, or better use of existing space, whatever; isn't that "6 of one, half-dozen of other" territory you're nitpicking at? The bigger point remains the same: Google is not taking away your ability to be annoying on message boards. Especially not yours.

good riddence

[PJ6]

The only time I use caps lock is when I unintentionally hit it. I've been prying that and the insert key off my keyboards for years.

Re:what's most interesting is their reason

[owlstead]

Yet, here you are...

Re:It's up to them!

[Dthief]

mod ++++

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[Sal Zeta]

I doubt you're going to do too much CAD related work on an ARM netbook running an extremely specialized OS :)

And by the way, I'm sure they' will implement a "toggle" option for the left Shift key.

That is absolutely freaking ridiculous

[sean.peters]

I took a "proper" typing skills class back in the days of the IBM Selectric, and I can promise you that "proper" typing of all-caps words was and is done with the capslock key.

Dude, have you ever even used a keyboard? Type the word "NATO" with capslock. Then type it using the shift key. That's a very short word, and yet you practically need to twist your hands into pretzels to type it without capslock, and it massively slows down your typing.

Call me when you've actually tried typing something that's partially in all-caps.

Re:That is absolutely freaking ridiculous

[Khyber]

NATO.

That was using my right pinky to shift and typing the rest of the word normally, no contortion at all, barely a shift of my wrist. Are you using DVORAK or something instead of QWERTY?

And that was without looking. What sort of 'proper' typing class did you take, again?

NATO

That was done with the left shift key/left pinky. A little off because I have to shift my ring finger to get the A instead of using my pinky, but still nothing else changed.

You might want to TRY what you speak of before speaking of it.

Re:That is absolutely freaking ridiculous

[Khyber]

I should also mention my hands are large enough to handle an 8-string bass guitar, and I typed that on a laptop keyboard.

Sorry but I'm not buying it

[sean.peters]

For what it's worth, I have entirely normal sized hands (I bought a pair of gloves last week in medium and would probably have been better off with a large.)

And quite frankly, I find your numbers literally impossible to believe. With capslock, your fingers are free to just type. Without it, you need to continually switch back and forth between both little fingers to free up the appropriate hand: {right shift}SE{left shift}N{right shift}TE{left shift}N{right shift}CE... 5 context shifts just for one word. My times for the same sentence you typed were almost four times as long without capslock.

And finally, it really doesn't matter to me how proficient you are with or without capslock; or whether or not you like it. Don't like it? Fine, don't use it. For me, it's a requirement, and I won't be buying any system that doesn't include it.

Re:Sorry but I'm not buying it

[Hatta]

Actually, I just pick a side and stick with it. Three fingered touch typing is not that hard. Personally, I'm in favor of the caps lock key, I just couldn't resist your challenge. I'll admit doing that all day would get uncomfortable.

Re:By Accident

[Erikderzweite]

I use Caps Lock to switch between my keyboard layouts. Much more convenient than Ctrl-Shift or Alt-Shift combos.

Seriously, it is

[sean.peters]

But seriously, it's really not that hard to type acronyms with the shift key

Seriously, it is. I've tried it, and not only is it massively slower, it's almost physically painful to do. And I really doubt I'm some kind of a freak in this regard, because if it was so easy to type in allcaps without capslock, why is there a capslock?

I continue to be amazed at the number of people lining up to tell me that I'm all screwed up for preferring to use the keyboard the way it's designed to be used. Don't like capslock? Fine, don't use it, remap it, whatever. But for me it's a no-kidding requirement, and I won't be buying any system that doesn't include it. I'm not sure why so many people feel the need to tell me that my personal opinion is factually incorrect.

Re:By Accident

[Erikderzweite]

Hey, hands off Scroll Lock! On my laptop keyboard it is the top-rightmost (or right-topmost) key, very convenient to use it for yakuake...

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[Buelldozer]

So your primary concern about running CAD on a Chrome Netbook is the lack of a capslock key?

Re:alan cummings approves

[Tetsujin]

I know a number of places that still have databases where the policy is to put everything in in all caps to fix issues of sorting mixed case (on ancient systems) and duplicate entries. After all, if the database sees McDonald and Mcdonald as separate names, MCDONALD for everything fixes that.

In that case there's a simpler answer: the program you use to enter data into this database (whether it's a web front-end or whatever else) can capitalize everything for you.

The summary seems to approach this from two conflicting directions: "I don't like caps lock" and "taking it away equates to taking away people's freedom". That doesn't really make a lot of sense. The key is basically unnecessary in my opinion, and removing it is an improvement, particularly if this means the keyboard layout is better (i.e. wider keys on small devices - or a more useful key like CTRL or ALT in that position)

I think it was a mistake for them to make a comment about removing this key as a way of "improving the quality of comments" - I think people are feeling slighted by that. If they'd just said "we want to simplify the keyboard layout by removing a key we feel isn't useful enough for its position on the home row" I think this would have been better-received.

On the other hand, I think it'd be reasonable to compare this kind of move to, say, Apple's efforts at getting people to use a one-button mouse to "simplify" the interface... Though the problem there was that the second mouse button is actually tied to some useful, commonly-used functionality. Apple has followed an increasingly bizarre and confusing path in their efforts to stick to that "one button" rule while still providing the right-click functionality without the need for keyboard chording... In particular, the "invisible right-mouse-button" that looks like part of a single, large mouse button - or mice and trackballs with no distinct mouse buttons at all... But it seems to me that caps lock really [i]is[/i] extraneous. There's no essential functionality that's lost with this change.

Re:By Accident

[steveg]

The corollary, of course, is that I hit it all the time, accidentally. On most of the computers I use regularly, I've added these lines to .Xmodmap:

remove Lock = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Shift_L

and that eliminates the problem. It's really annoying to find myself on a machine that doesn't have my fix on it.

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[steveg]

There are plenty of legitimate uses for a caps lock key -- but none that *I* ever use. I find it an annoyance that it's so easy to hit accidentally.

The Happy Hacking keyboard has what I thought was the perfect solution -- Caps Lock was a shifted key sequence (Fn+Tab.) Always available, but *really* hard to hit by accident.

!Apple

[vlueboy]

People who still using caps 100% of the time on facebook do not speak English. They demand CAPS keys because they hate how unofficial (compared to all-caps legalese) "all lowercase" looks. They get away with it because they're normally old, and they grew up with analog typewriters where CAPS could not be specially accented... 40 years later, they still avoid putting tilde accent marks, umlauts and other language-dependent stuff, although TV closed-captioning and non-DOS systems permit accented uppercase.

Back on topic: Google is not Apple. It can't just up boldly censor us all at once and expect to walk away unhurt by market forces.

I am a COBOL programmer...

[Tirs]

...you insensitive Google clods!

(Yes, I am THAT old).

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[wiredlogic]

I'm always annoyed by the whiners who complain about the "uselessness" of the caps lock key because they never use it. If you've ever had to do any alphanumeric data entry where upper case is necessary, the caps lock is a saving grace not a curse.

Solving a problem that does not exist

[gordguide]

Call me crazy, but I occasionally type with one finger while doing two things (one of which involves the KB) and the Caps Lock key is invaluable there, even for typing just one uppercase character. I do think that's something netbook users are going to want to do as often, if not more often, than, for example, traditional larger laptop users ... similarly I like to spell properly, so I'm going to want to type DELL instead of dell, USPTO instead or uspto, and so on. I also use Caps Lock on my smartphone while texting ... where yelling is often appropriate, not simple bad behaviour in a forum post.

The offered reason to remove the Caps Lock key is commendable ... saving users from themselves ... but isn't it easier to just correct bad behaviour with another post from a different user ... which is practically guaranteed to happen, in my experience ... than to take a useful tool away from everyone, including those who actually know how to use it?

This is the kind of "dumbing down" where everyone pays; I'm not in favour of it at all. It joins a long list of things we are being forced to do to help the functionally lesser members of our society, like Anti-Lock Brakes, which is fine if it's defeatable in a car but a pain if it's not (and if you can't see a situation where ALB is a hinderance to safety or control let's just agree we don't drive in the same places under the same conditions, and you can leave it on all the time).

Do we really need "caps control" ?

[benjto]

Caps lock keys don't cause bad comments. Commenters do.

Google's attempt to influence users' commenting behavior by virtue of a hardware change just smells of "we know better" and will surely have unintended consequences. What about the areas of computer input where lack of contiguous capital letters is considered bad form? (e.g. static fields in java, some common SQL conventions).

I can see the exercise of choice by developers and users answering this in two ways:

1. Choosing to implement some kind of module into Chromium that will interpret something like a double shift click to be equivalent to a caps lock toggle
2. Choosing to use a different product with a caps lock key

Re:Not rocket science

[interval1066]

"(You're not a full-time database programmer, are you?)"

Nope. Do a little of everything, including maintenance, which means I get to see a lot of coding styles. A LOT. After several years of doing this kind of work I guess I'm a little jaded and have little need for case in most circumstances. I also posit that had there never been mainframes and the primative ttys I mentioned in the earlier post that case for sql keywords would never have developed. Object-oriented programmers (which came much, much later than procedural-oriented sql) prefer their keywords in lower case. From where I sit, either works, and is only easier to read if you're stuck in a rut. So I'm still stymied to understand the real need for case in sql statements. I'm sure its a good one, make sure you flag it so I don't miss it.

FIRST!

[kirov]

while they're at it they should take away the word "first" then all comments will immediately improve!

Re:By Accident

[pthisis]

It has nothing to do with IDEs. Emacs did this just fine in the late 1980s, and vim's handled it for the past 15 years or so.

That covers both editors a programmer might use. ;)

who capitalizes the capitalizers?

[mrzaph0d]

Reminds me of the famous quote:
"They who can give up CAPS Lock to obtain a little better commentary, deserve neither."

Re:So who is the target market?

[Kilrah_il]

It's an OS that is actually a browser with Web apps. I think you could deduce from that that the target audience is someone who uses the computer mostly for Internet work and other applications that could be replaced with Web apps (e.g. Google Docs instead of MS Office).
Although there are some on-line development environments, there is still no replacement for a dedicated programming software. I think also gamers, graphic designers and other people who need high end computers are not targeted by Chrome OS. The same goes for all the businesses who have custom software critical for their day to day operation.

Re:By Accident

[Vegemeister]

I always swapped shift and capslock, because I didn't like having to check the state of capslock every time I exited the game. Using capslock for anything is a very poor design decision.

vers libre

[grikdog]

mehitabel remarked
just the other day
what am going to do
with all these dam
caps lock keys
but i must be forgiven
in this instance because
i thought she said cops
lock
which says i puffing on a
jeweled hookah seems
like a good idea
to me, boss
as always
archie

Ambidextrous mousing

[Artifice_Eternity]

I'm a lefty, but can mouse ambidextrously. I've ended up using my left hand to mouse at work, and right at home, so that I don't overstrain one or the other. I have no trouble at all switching back and forth.

Gentlemen prefer caps lock mapped to CONTROL

[Dast]

Only barbarians use caps lock. True gentlemen prefer the key to be mapped to an extra Control.

However, I'll quickly turn into a barbarian if you take the whole key away.

It's all about control

[vanyel]

I don't care if there *is* a caps lock key, as long as it's not where the Control key belongs! IBM really screwed that one up 30 years ago...

COMPOSE key

[dargaud]

I write in 3 languages on a US keyboard (no accents). I used to know all the Alt codes by heart, but now on Linux I converted the [Caps lock] key to a [Compose] key. That's a very handy trick to do é: press Compose and ', then e. For â, press Compose-Shift-^ then a, etc. And here's how you set it up in KDE: You go in [System Settings][Regional & Language][Keyboard layout][Advanced][Compose key position] and select Caps Lock. Plenty of combinations.

NeXT had no Caps Lock key

[Jaxoreth]

The NeXT keyboards had no Caps Lock key. Caps Lock mode was toggled by pressing Shift while holding down Command. They may also have been the first keyboards to integrate the Caps Lock mode LED indicator into the key itself (the Shift key, in this case).

Apple's original approach was a physically locking Caps Lock key, which also succeeded in preventing accidental engagement of Caps Lock mode. Sadly, they don't use either of these methods anymore.

If only...

[Gnavpot]

...we could get rid of the Num Lock key on full size keyboards...

Choice is good, so more choices is gooer

[verifiedCoward]

Assuming that choice really is good, shouldn't we put 26 caps lock keys on our keyboard so that we can have choice about which individual letter get shifted?

Re:Holding a key and typing with one hand is awkwa

[aiht]

I type with one hand.

Too much information right there.

His boyfriend won't let him have the other hand back for a couple of minutes.

Who, Darth Vader?

You don't need a Caps Lock key to get Caps Lock

[astrosmash]

The Chrome keyboard does support Caps Lock, in a design inspired by Steve Jobs' old company. Here's a little history:

The original NeXTcube keyboard (circa 1989) also did not have a Caps Lock key. Instead, Caps Lock was engaged by pressing Command+Shift, which would light up matching green LEDs on both Shift keys. Caps Lock was disengaged by pressing the Shift key a second time. This freed up valuable keyboard real estate, eliminated the possibility of hitting Caps by accident, and allowed the Control key to be placed next to the "A" key, where it has always belonged. It's an excellent design.

Fast forward 20 years and Google is doing the same thing with the Chrome keyboard. Its Shift key also has a green LED to indicate Caps Lock. Presumbaly, Caps Lock is engaged in a similar way as the NeXT keyboard.

Unfortunately, they're putting a "Search" button there in its place, which is just stupid.

It's annoying but...

[BlackBloq]

            Some passwords I use are half caps half not so it's easy to throw the lock on, cuz I type passwords a lot. All my terminals auto log off after about 5 mins. of inactivity. And no I can't changes settings. So that would annoy me.

Re:It's annoying but...

[BlackBloq]

I can't change setting. ME SLEEPY! (Shift held for that :P)

bash.org disapproves :(

[jonaskoelker]

n00b> HELLO EVERYBODY!!
l33t> try pressing caps lock
n00b> THANKS IT SO MUCH EASIER TO TYPE NOW
l33t> oh fuck me :(

(bash.org says connection refused, I'm quoting from memory; the names are likely wrong, FWIW)

Using mouse lefthanded for righties

[Compaqt]

Here's another datapoint: I'm right-handed, but every year or so, I switch the handedness of my mouse. I.e., I put it to the right of the numpad one year, and to the left of capslock the other (also switching left/right in mouse options).

Try it sometime.

My main reason for doing so was to avoid repetitive stress clicking with the right hand. But there are other benefits, too: Most keyboards have the centerline (between homekeys F and J) offset to the left because of the navkeys and numpad. Put the mouse on the right, and it's a perversely far reach for mousing.

By putting the mouse on the left, you move the centerline back to the actual center of your keyboard tray.

It's also nice for general web usage: you have your left hand on the mouse, right hand on the PageUp/Down and arrow keys, and Ctrl is under your thumb, so you can Ctrl+click Reply on whatever comments you want to respond to in a new tab. Compare with right-side mouse: your right hand shifts between navkeys and the mouse.

Re:Using mouse lefthanded for righties

[Heian-794]

I do something similar: I have two computers at my desk at work, and I set up the one on the left side left-handed, and the right one right-handed. It keeps both hands in good mousing shape, allows me to have the two keyboards butting up against each other in the middle, and makes it very easy to operate both machines at the same time.

Curiously, not only does no one else at my office do this, but they all use both computers right-handed. I'm looking out at a field of dozens and dozens of desks, and every single one has two keyboards with the mice on the right-hand side of both. If only right-hander supremacism would go away; they could gain a lot of productivity by using both mice at once!

Re:Using mouse lefthanded for righties

[Maritz]

Can you look at two screens simultaneously? That'd be pretty special.

CUA shortcuts

[Compaqt]

>>(Ctrl-Ins : Copy, Shift-Del : Cut, Shift-Ins : Paste)

>It would seem Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X, and Ctrl-V (or Cmd on a Mac) would be easier and have the keys closer together

Actually, have another look: When using the Mac shortcuts (Ctrl+V), you're stretching your fingers horizontally (pinky on Ctrl and index on V).

Doing the equivalent for CUA shortcuts (Shift+Ins) with thumb on Shift and index on Ins, you're not stretching at all. Put your thumb on Shift, and the index finger naturally falls on Ins.

Ctrl+Ins and Shift+Del are similar.

Obligatory QDB/Bash quote

[Legion303]

#297667 (1441/1655)
  HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!
  try pressing the the Caps Lock key
  O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!!
  fuck me

Re:Obligatory QDB/Bash quote

[Legion303]

Yes, I fail at previews.

Last post! I used caps lock for artwork

[mattr]

The Caps Lock key is the only toggle button (which saves its state of being "down" or "up") on the keyboard usually. So not only is it important to some people, it also is the only way to signal to the system and various programs that are running on it at the same time, that they all should take a certain action (like "quit") when the caps lock state changes. I realized this and used it in an art work where photos sent to us were pulled down and put into a scriptable slide show program's photo queue. All programs could see the state of the Caps Lock so it was possible to send them all a signal at the same time by releasing it.
Of course a search key is neat too, I don't understand why not more keys instead of less.

HUH?

[JeffreyBreen]

WHAT'S THE CAPS LOCK KEY?

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[Just Some Guy]

We have lots of drawings where the convention is to put all text in caps. I use capslock all the time.

I despise when computers make humans do the work that computers should be doing. I don't know about your specific app, but I've used programs that have complained to me that a given field must be all uppercase. I've always thought, "Yeah? Do you think you could spare a few of those giga-IPS running through your multi-core processor to maybe take care of that for me? Got an implementation of str.upper() you can use on my input, maybe?"

Like in your case, can you script the app sufficiently that text entered into a description field is uppercased for you? I'd much rather spend an hour trying to figure out how to make that work and then be done with it for the rest of my life.

USB 1-Key Caps-Lock 'keyboard'

[bill_mcgonigle]

assomoe who needs to use all caps as part of his work, I find a caps lock key very effective.

Yeah, people typing legal documents and using old-fashioned computer systems are going to dislike(-1 Googles?) this. I predict somebody will start selling a $10 USB 'keyboard' that's just the shape of a bluetooth dongle and will have one switch for caps lock if this become prevalent. It should be trivial for a USB developer to map one switch to whatever the keycode is in the USB HID class.

Then you're safe!

[DavMz]

I doubt google will remove the caps lock key on MacBookPros. You're safe!
But I agree with you for the smaller spacebar. It took me a while to get used to it.

Re:Does anyone actually use it legitimately?

[Cimexus]

Noone is suggesting that a 'caps lock' feature should be entirely absent. They are just saying it probably doesn't, in this day and age, require a huge, dedicated, prominently placed key. Double tapping shift or something to toggle allcaps would make sense: your allcaps functionality is still there and still able to be quickly activated, and the space occupied by the old caps lock key can now be used for something more useful.

Re:By Accident

[Cimexus]

Yeah, I like the idea of getting rid of a dedicated caps lock key and mapping caps lock to 'double tap shift' or something, but as you say, you'd have to consider the consequences of that.

I have similar habits to you (tend to accidentally turn on that damn sticky keys, especially in games where shift = run and I have a little burst of run-walk-run-walk-run :P

If the double tap had to be very rapid (think mouse double clicking) though, I doubt you'd accidentally activate it very often. It seems to me that the behaviour of absent mindedly tapping shift while making up your mind about something wouldn't depress shift rapidly enough to trigger it in that case...