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Chrome Does Have a Caps-Lock Key After All
Meshach writes "Amidst all the angst about Google taking away the caps lock key from Chrome it now appears that is not the case. With one small change any user can change the Modifier Key from a Search key to a Caps Lock key. Peace has been restored..." If there must be such a thing as a Caps Lock key on conventional keyboards, I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair) to a hard-to-fumble-upon switch on the bottom of the keyboard or laptop.
You dont use the delete key? how do you delete files? right click?!?
You do know timothy, that backspace is not delete right?
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My printer only has capital letters, you insensitive clods.
THAT'S AWESOME!
Sounds like someone doesn't program using constants....
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
What I want to know is how I can patch the kernel to force num lock on and ignore all attempts to turn it off.
Why get rid of the Delete key? Insert I can understand, but Delete? It's so danged useful for when you've stupidly mistyped the beginning of a very long command... Just Home then Delete a few times...
I dot get why is that everybody bragging about google's laptop. Its black, its crap. Google did pospone the release of its OS. Google did not say what major brands will have their OS. Now they got crappy black laptop to present. ...
Not sure how many realize how Google advitised their Gmail & Wave. Google made everybody talk about these services: Do yu haveit, I dont, Maybe you should get it, crap I have - you dont
First thing I do to new computers is remap caps lock to control, the way God and RMS intended. I move escape too. Annoys the snot out of my wife and kids, but that's hardly my problem.
I'm not really sure why that much keyboard real estate needs to be dedicated to search. Seems like a goofy default.
Then, the solution is to have a Missile Switch Cover-type http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9278 thing over the Delete key. Makes my Nuclear General fantasy more believable too.
I work in the Employment office in Gresham, Oregon USA. I help people use computers. In order to get unemployment checks in Oregon, all applicants have to complete this long questionaire on a PC about their occupational skills, work history, and personal status. People can do this on-line or come into our 'worksource center' and use the computers that we have here. And I'm supposed to help them. (I get minimum wage for this and no benefits. Nnot that that is important. I just want you to know that I'm not a highly paid government employee)
The information is supposed to match the unemployed with the jobs that all the companies in Oregon have available.
Not a bad concept except for two things. There are no jobs, and, about half of the people coming through the process can't use computers. And about 15-20% of the people can't speak english and have never, ever, ever used a computer before. I am not bullshitting you about this. It seems like a fantasy to highly-educated young Slashdaughters like yourself, but I assure you that this is the case in the lower-middle class neighborhoods of the USA (and probably the rest of the world as well).
So I get a lot of people who have never typed on a keyboard before. And they get put in front of a keyboard that was designed for advanced professional word-processing business typists of the early 1980's era. A lot of them must feel like they've been abducted by space aliens, especially the ones who have come from pre-industrial cultures and have been doing 'under the table' unskilled construction labor or fruit picking.
I would greatly help if there were only half of the keys on the PC keyboard that there are presently. And get rid of the fucking Num-lock key and the stupid Caps-Lock key!
Please.
I'm not kidding about this. Just do it.
I will just glue my shift key down to make you mad.
What's wrong with the delete key? It's incredibly useful in text/code editing, even browser URL path ammending - saves me having to hunt to the end of a string to then backspace from - not to mention being slaved in many programs such as Thunderbird to, you know, delete things.
What is it with this crazy trend of removing useful keys??
I don't really care much about caps lock, which is only very rarely useful. But the Delete key??? How do you delete stuff (files, icons, ...) without it? How do you delete right of the cursor instead of left?
Already, Page Up/Down and Home/End are gone on many notebook keyboards, making simple stuff like select to the start/end of line (Shift-Home / Shift-End) too clumsy to be useful when you need to hold a third Fn key simultaneously. And selecting to the end of the document becomes almost impossible.
So now someone is advocating the removal of Insert/Delete?
What is the next step? The return of Bob as a geek power-user OS?
Here you go!
Using a Chrome notebook
I won't be happy until they bring back the NUM LOCK key!!!!!
You must be a Mac user.
xmodmap -e "clear Lock"
If this doesn't work, get a real operating system.
I mean this is the second story on this amazing saga of whether the Chrome OS will have caps lock. Are any of the techies who visit this site going to buy a laptop that can only run one program (Chrome) and can't be modified?
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair) to a hard-to-fumble-upon switch on the bottom of the keyboard or laptop.
The only thing that will change it make it hard to turn off, so that we'll have users going for months with their caps lock on because they can't find where to switch it back.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
How the heck do I do that?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
>"If there must be such a thing as a Caps Lock key on conventional keyboards, I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair) to a hard-to-fumble-upon switch on the bottom of the keyboard or laptop."
There are many reasons one might need or want a Caps-lock key and it doesn't and shouldn't be hidden away. I often need one when coding and doing certain types of data entry. I certainly find it a lot more valuable than the apparently mandated, non-standard, changing, "my this" and "my that" keys that appear all over the place. And what do you have against the del/ins keys??? They are very valuable in word processing and editors.
If you are so hot to banish a key, it should be the damn NumLock key, which has caused nothing but stress and anger in the 30 years I have been using computers. Any modern keyboard that has both a keypad and cursor/ins/del/pgup/down keys should be mapped so they stay the way they were meant to be used and not mysteriously changed when using vnc, a different Xserver, in some emulator, moving to a different VT, etc. Or perhaps the seemingly-mandated "MS-Windows" keys, which should be something generic that doesn't insult everyone who uses some other operating system on their computer.
What about ctrl+delete (cut)
what about ctrl+insert (paste)
What about CTRL+ALT+DELETE?
Did you actually think about how others use the keys before you so cavalierly decided to banish a key? And why pick on insert delete when there is so much more low hanging fruit? Why not pick on F9-F12? Scroll lock?! Or the duplicated forward slashes or pipe key? Who uses tilde or grave!? And I guess we couldn't get rid of one set or the other of the windows keys?
Personally, I cannot dispense with a single key for me or my clients. If I'm on a support call the last thing I want to hear is "I don't have a delete key" –
No! They cannot, there is no taskbar!.
You might as well upload a virus that prevents you from accessing the windows task manager. Please let's think about the children, they'll be supporting windows XP until they die, let’s give them a easy way to log on to the machine.
I hope all these forward thinking kids think about the repercussions of their actions before we end up with a crappy cell phone keyboard hooked up to a Cray 32.
No, really, I use it frequently. Not just to post inane l33tspeak to the interwebs either. I mean I really do use the thing as part of my daily life. I deal with a few hundred part numbers, many of them are long numbers, sprinkled with letters in there.. My left hand hit the caps lock and my right hand jumps to the numpad and I'm pecking out E5-FU7-Z009A001 etc for a few lines... Natural, easy. The way the keyboard has been used for... Well decades, getting rid of the caps lock is even dumber than adding "windows" keys and whatever other crap we added to go from 101 to 10-Whatever we're at now. Key combinations are more suited for those extra functions.
Oh yeah smart guy?! How about the "SCROLL LOCK" key?!? Huh Mr. Smartey man?!?
Damn right I'm right!
this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm-Vnx58UYo&NR=1
Probably because of the fire, nitrogen and conveyor belt.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
http://www.bash.org/?835030
you are not showing my Google negative post ,you much did they pay you?
my currnet machine, comprising of 3 (1650X 1080) screens, a stolen rack server from my work (with the tapes for the tape drive), track ball mouse and my new 8 key optical, logitech G19, addition storare via my NAS box. and i am going to be proud when i say , that im typing this with my dads Model Ms that i stole from him all those years ago.
We need keys for the "cents", "degree", "multiplication" and "division" symbols, and a shift-tab key to tab backwards through form fields.
And when web browsers properly implement multicolumn text (where columns are added and removed as needed based on the browser window size), we'll need "Page Left" and "Page Right" keys.
And how often do non-programmers need the "carot" symbol, the "pipe" symbol, or curly braces? Get a programmer's keyboard if you need those.
And it would be nice if Apple and Microsoft could agree on the meanings of the "Home" and "End" keys.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Not too sure how to achieve this (well depends on OS I suppose) but maybe a setting could be implemented that caps lock only activates/deactivates after a long press - say 3 to 4 seconds. Now unless you want to wRiTe iN a MaNiC wAy - it should be less annoying for those who are bothered by accidentally pressing it now and again. Far more irritating for me personally, is accidental press against the trackpad on my laptop causing cursor focus to change or browser "back" to occur causing loss of whatever form I happen to be filling in.
I don't use caps lock very often and could live without it - I'm sure my little finger won't drop off from holding the shift key down on rare occasions - but in what parallel universe are delete and insert useless?! I use delete *all the time*: any and all text editting and deleting files spring immediately to mind. Same for insert: am I really the only person who uses overwrite mode regularly when typing?
Hell if we're talking useless keys I'd nominate backspace. I realised recently that when I want to delete a word I've just typed I automatically ctrl-shift-left to highlight and delete to delete.
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Its not normal for me to post on slashdot, I can't remember my login info. But as a software engineer who uses a computer more than 75% of the waking hours... at work, at home, any keyboard that is pretty much only used by me: I pop off the capslock and insert keys. Supposedly you can disable the features of these keys in windows registry. But I like the mechanical visibility. People see my keyboard and ask about my missing keys, and I'm always happy to tell them that I'd prefer the keys didn't exist.
I would greatly help if there were only half of the keys on the PC keyboard that there are presently. And get rid of the fucking Num-lock key and the stupid Caps-Lock key!
It seems like the most widely distributed low-keycount keyboard.
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They came first for the Caps Lock key,
and I didn't speak up because I didn't use Caps Lock.
Then they came for Scroll Lock,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a tty user.
Then they came for the Print Scr / Sys Req key,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a print screener or Linux kernel hacker.
Then they came for a key I did use
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
From the original poster: "...I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair)..." If you wish for the Insert and Delete keys to be banished, you must be right handed. We left handers, who use a mouse in our left hands, enjoy using the Ctrl+Insert, Shift+Insert, and Shift+Delete key combos for copy, paste, and cut. It's hard to do Ctrl+V with your right hand. Or maybe you just use VI.
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
There isn't really a problem that there are keys like caps lock -- they can be remapped for other purposes; just check out the Colemak layout. But that isn't to say that today's standard 101-key is the model of perfection. One problem is the arbitrary sizing and spacing on many keys; should the space bar be wider than five other keys and as far into the center as 'b', thereby not having any other thumb keys? How about the massive dead spaces common between the function keys and the number keys? That's not the least of the historical relicry, either.
A modern keyboard is designed for someone with two right hands. Tell me that "middle finger -> c" is as comfortable as "middle finger -> ,". Tell it to me, and I will call you a liar. Ultimately the slanting was to make room for the typewriter transmission bars in a historical sense, but now that the bars are gone, we need to re-think what exactly we're doing with our layouts. Check out the uTron keyboard for an example of what is possible in a modern design (not that I condone every key's placement on that thing, or the pricing.)
I hate the CAPS LOCK key. Always bumping it. On some computers it's huge, even the biggest key. WTF
Why does the most annoying key have to be huge.
CAPSLOCK. It's like CRUISE CONTROL for AWESOME!
If there must be such a thing as a Caps Lock key on conventional keyboards, I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair) to a hard-to-fumble-upon switch on the bottom of the keyboard or laptop.
Yeah, if you remove the CAPS LOCK key from your keyboard, you could save enough space to add a key. If I had one, it would have been used to type the sentence before this one.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Seriously.
Seriously. People incapable of using both hands at once, how are they going to manage comfortably typing all the capital letters without caps-lock?
Too many seem to only think of how they themselves use something an assume the entire world needs only that.
We are all God's parents.
As a person who types in Colemak, I would be devastated if my CapsLock key was taken away --- though the initial key need not be CapsLock. As long as there's some key in its place, I'd be fine.
Powered by a nVidia Tegra 2 processor and a special version of Android.
However, reviews haven't been kind on it:
http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/03/review_netbook_toshiba_ac100/
10/100
"The beautifully designed and executed hardware is very close to my ideal netbook, and it's hardly an exaggeration to say that I'm heart-broken by Toshiba's cocked-up Android implementation. The best one can hope for is a firmware rescue from the open source community, although I wonder if the product will stay around long enough in these tablet-obsessed times for that to happen."
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/laptops-portable-pcs/laptops-and-netbooks/toshiba-ac100-721195/review?artc_pg=4
2.5/5
Verdict
"If you want a device for carrying the web around with you, and you don't want a tablet and can't be bothered with a Windows 7 powered netbok, then the AC100 may be for you.
There's no denying it works and that you can browse the internet on it, but it's how it goes about doing this that most disappoints.
Especially as the AC100 could have been great, it still has lots going for it – the most crucial being excellent portability.
For us, however, the poor implementation of Android 2.1 remains a deal breaker."
It is hard to believe that most people on Slashdot cannot touch type, even after several years of work with computers. If you have learnt touch typing, then it would be obvious that Caps Lock is very useful while writing code. I have to admit, however, that the usual keyboard was difficult for me too. If you are like me, look at a Kinesis Advantage keyboard, it took me only 10 minutes, literally, to start touch typing.
And yes, the delete key on the usual keyboard is also on the wrong place, but for god sake, do not remove it, just put it into the right place.
Double tapping the shift key turns on caps lock, tapping again turns off caps lock.
Just like it does on android phones. It's really simple and gets rid of that extra not needed key.
They didn't get rid of the caps lock key they just made shift do double duty.
I use the caps lock key for captchas (the case sensitive ones anyways) .... wait... well we should just mush the q and u keys together and make you press a func button to get either by itself....
I rarely use the q key by itself
or just one shift key instead of two or the alt and shift keys. lets just get rid of all of them and make it voice activated. or lets do none of that and leave useless modification to 360 games.
I like to say "A model M is the only keyboard you can use to kill a man; then type his obituary."
I really like to say that, at least once a month.
there is a perfect keyboard. the design is done. patent is pending. from the “father of the perfect keyboard”.
This is obviously something geeks care about, there are more comments in here than in the china blocking nobel price story.
My keyboard philosophy is "more is less". I want to reach all keys from touch position and need a keyboard that provides that: Happy Hacking Keyboard. Not only is it much faster because I dont need to move my hands much. It also takes up much less space on my desk. Combined with emacs, this is the most powerful user input method I know of.
I never use caps-lock, but if I have to I have a two-key combo that enables it. A special key on the home row for caps lock is just stupid.
The French will be quite annoyed if you get rid of caps lock as their numbers are all in the shift position making caps lock pretty much mandatory if you are entering long numbers.
Trifecta is complete (and much easier to type than CTRL-C etc., I always seem to end up typing CTRL-C when I meant CTRL-V and vice-versa.
No sig today...
Key combinations are fine (I use Emacs extensively, so I can laugh at what some proponents of key combinations actually use), but the more keys you have that are free for mapping commonly used functions to without having to resort to to many context switches or prefix keys the better. In the days where glass terminals were still the norm they knew how to design a keyboard. Look at the IBM offerings for their mainframe terminals, the DEC keyboards (although they're mechanically challenged), the Lisp machine keyboards (including the mother of them all, the Space cadet keyboard) or the input devices of Doug Englebart (who was very much into using both hands at the same time instead of just pointing and clicking with a mouse -- to a fault, you could argue, but he was onto something).
When it comes to making keyboards with more instead of less keys, Apple has got it right. I hope they don't buy into the whole trend of eradicating keys although that would go very well with their overall design philosophy (remember the Apple remote? so few buttons it's barely useful in general).
Is adding diacritics in Hebrew, which (on Windows) is done by shift-1 to shift-0 while Caps Lock is activated.
When I want to write in all-caps, I simply hold the shift for the whole process. It's not that hard!
^_^
People who get worked up because someone used all-caps are idiots. It's just fonts and typing.. so what? It's not the same as someone yelling in your ears, and if your poor eyes are hurt by it then maybe you should avoid reading altogether. To try to police such a thing, is several orders of magnitude more idiotic. GG Google.
> Shift-Ctrl-C and -V usually work in X terminals, though.
So does memorizing the whole thing and typing it out again. Shift-Insert is an extremely fast & convenient way to paste.
And as someone who is always surfing on the fringes of RSI, I don't like anything that requires me to bunch together three fingers, turn the hand and then press. It's a small thing, but over time, it's noticeable.
Yes! The Caps Lock key is clearly wonderful – as a control key. Can't say I've ever used the right control key, but that's probably personal taste. The Windows key as well; I can't understand why Linux desktop environments always map the window manager actions to Ctrl or Alt, often conflicting with applications, instead of using the otherwise useless Windows key – at least as a easily chosen option. The most annoying key ever is Shift-4 on Scandinavian keyboards, mapped to the useless currency symbol () instead of the dollar sign (which is much harder to reach at AltGr-4).
... I'd get rid of the windows keys, as I need decently-sized control and alt. I'd probably repurpose caps lock for compose or something, though on my current keyboard I used a different spare key for that. Amazing how the right shift is positively huge but especially on laptops control and alt are stupidly small because of a few hateful keys I never use.
Thank you for sharing Crtl-Ins and Shift-Ins with us. I have been using Linux for over 10 years, and never have heard of such a thing. Talk about well kept usability secrets!
testing out my trending skills
Yeah, coz "Foobar of Borg" is a totally trace-able name of course!
America, Home of the Brave.
if IE9 will defeat Chrome or not :)
"I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair) to a hard-to-fumble-upon switch on the bottom of the keyboard or laptop."
Why, so people will turn it on once and never bother to turn it off?
Caps lock should be activated automatically when your blood pressure rises above a threshold level.
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Everyone does realize that backspace and delete actually have different functions, right? This keeps getting passed over. Backspace erases before the cursor, delete erases after. Forget key combos, both keys have very important functions as they stand. If you want to delete text, you only have to land somewhere in the block instead of clicking at one pre-specified end. Click the middle, backspace a few times, delete the rest, boom. Very convenient. My wife never learned what the Shift key was for until well after she'd learned to type in school. She'd needed a cap, one key said cap on it, logically she pressed the caps key and went from there. To this day, she still thinks of Shift as a punctuation key and Caps Lock as the caps key. She types 60+wpm like that, and it's hard to argue against. If I had learned to type that way, coding would probably be easier. My shift fingers could use some variety.
The key to the left of 'A' (US English Keyboard) was Control, not Caps-Lock. Caps-Lock was activated/deactivated with Command-Shift. Caps-Lock as a key in such prime real estate on the keyboard is idiotic.
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Pathetic discussion.
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I may be in a minority here but I wish they would get rid of the caps lock key forever.
I had a stroke and the control on my left hand is less than good (its poor) so I was forever hitting the caps lock key with out realizing it.
I have to buy an application that actually disables the key.
I wish it had never been invented.