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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.

25 of 391 comments (clear)

  1. delete key? what? by citylivin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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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    As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
    1. Re:delete key? what? by jmorris42 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      > IF you want to talk about useless keys, let's talk about the 'context menu key' that is located beside the right windows key.

      Useless keys are very valuable if you think outside the box. Map it to a compose key. Or use it as a special key for things like virtual machines instead of having to make do with chording a bunch of the buckybits. Of course if one is stuck on stupid (i.e. Windows) then there probably isn't much use for a useless key.

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      Democrat delenda est
    2. Re:delete key? what? by h4rr4r · · Score: 3, Funny

      Get a Man's keyboard. I never have that problem on my Model Ms.

    3. Re:delete key? what? by HeronBlademaster · · Score: 5, Informative

      Shift+Insert is sometimes easier than Ctrl+V for pasting stuff, but I can't think of any other reason I use the key.

    4. Re:delete key? what? by jmorris42 · · Score: 3, Informative

      > What does anyone need the Insert key for?

      You poor deprived fool. Ins toggles between insert and overstrike in Vi/Vim. Use it most days. You obviously need better tools.

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      Democrat delenda est
    5. Re:delete key? what? by RobertM1968 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Get a Man's keyboard. I never have that problem on my Model Ms.

      Same here... :-) The IBM Model M: The World's Greatest PC Keyboard!!!

    6. Re:delete key? what? by HeronBlademaster · · Score: 5, Informative

      If you're using a Linux terminal (or an ssh session in PuTTY or something), Ctrl+V doesn't paste (for the same reason that Ctrl+C does not copy), but Shift+Insert does.

    7. Re:delete key? what? by sexconker · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's the reverse for me. The Insert key is so close to the Delete key that I sometimes hit it by accident. What does anyone need the Insert key for?

      Hey guys, scroll lock and pause/break are useless!
      Also, this control key? What's the point of that?!

      Protip: Every key on the keyboard is useful. Just because you and your programs don't make use of a key doesn't mean you should have any input about the layout of my input devices.

      Real talk: Got Excel? Click a cell, use the arrow keys. Hit scroll lock. Click a cell, use the arrow keys. HOLY SHIT A FUNCTION FOR A KEY YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT. (Might work in Calc. I wouldn't know, since I'm not a masochist.)

    8. Re:delete key? what? by joaommp · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "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."

      Sorry, I have never been so pissed of in my /. life and I've got to say: "timothy, you're an idiot".

      People that don't use the whole keyboard and key combos have no idea how much productivity they are throwing away. That's one of the thing I hate about mac keyboards and Apple's inability to understand that people have a limited number of fingers.

    9. Re:delete key? what? by moonbender · · Score: 3, Informative

      Shift-Ctrl-C and -V usually work in X terminals, though.

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    10. Re:delete key? what? by Kozz · · Score: 3, Informative

      "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."

      Sorry, I have never been so pissed of in my /. life and I've got to say: "timothy, you're an idiot".

      People that don't use the whole keyboard and key combos have no idea how much productivity they are throwing away. That's one of the thing I hate about mac keyboards and Apple's inability to understand that people have a limited number of fingers.

      Additionally, those of us accustomed to working with *nix operating systems know that CTRL-INS and SHIFT-INS are handy combinations for copy & paste, especially when you don't want to actually send CTRL characters to the terminal. And they work in Windows, too. Speaking of which... Timothy, what would you recommend as an alternative to the 'three-finger salute'?

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    11. Re:delete key? what? by iron-kurton · · Score: 3, Insightful

      True, I remember the game going black for a second and the start menu popping up, and then thinking "Shit."

      But seriously, one thing Microsoft did get right is that they pretty much reserved the windows-key as a system-wide shortcut key. Start-D (desktop), Start-L (lock), Start-R (run), Start-F (find), Start-E (explorer). I *love* those key bindings.

      Contrast with Mac's F9, F10, F11 and F12 keys. If your program just happens to use one of those keys, you're shit-out-of-luck (as is the case when trying to debug something in Visual Studio in a virtual machine, for example).

      --
      Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine -- Robert C. Gallagher
    12. Re:delete key? what? by DavidD_CA · · Score: 3, Interesting

      IF you want to talk about useless keys, let's talk about the 'context menu key' that is located beside the right windows key.

      I use the Context key frequently. For example, if you're typing in Word and the spell checker identifies a mistake (red squiggle), I can put my cursor inside the word and use the Context key to pull up the spell check results. This is far faster than grabbing the mouse to use a right-click.

      Likewise with working on files. I often navigate to folders and open them without using the mouse. The Context key lets me "right click" whatever I have selected so that I can send it to a USB drive, email it as an attachment, or open it with an alternative program.

      I would say it gets far more use than the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock combined.

      --
      -David
  2. My printer only has capital letters by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My printer only has capital letters, you insensitive clods.

  3. Get rid of all these stupid useless keys by Simonetta · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Get rid of all these stupid useless keys by h4rr4r · · Score: 3, Informative

      It was used so you could scroll up and down on a terminal with the arrow keys. Now, get off my lawn.

  4. How to kill the evil capslock key by yelvington · · Score: 4, Funny

    xmodmap -e "clear Lock"

    If this doesn't work, get a real operating system.

  5. How would you ever turn it off? by lawpoop · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  6. Speak for yourself! by Coolhand2120 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    How do you switch your cursor from insert to overwrite mode? How do you delete characters on the right hand side of the cursor? How would you easily delete a line via keyboard (CTRL+DELETE).

    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" –

    “Oh they can right click on the task bar!”

    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.

  7. Re:WHO CARES? by jmorris42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > Are any of the techies who visit this site going to buy a laptop that can only run one program and can't be modified?

    Don't bet on that last bit. I'm totally stoked about Chrome but not because I actually want such a retarded thing. How long have we been waiting for ARM based netbooks? Just when it looked like the Year of Linux on the Netbook was here and would soon abandon the power guzzling Atom for a more sensible ARM, Wintel threw its weight around and netbooks vanished. Hint: if it isn't cheap, small, light, flash based and netcentric it ain't a netbook. What the marketing folks are branding as netbooks these days are three pounds plus and have hard hard drives loaded with Windows. Well now here comes ARM based hardware just waiting to get repurposed to running a more general purpose netbook environment. And rooted it will be, just like every Android product has been rooted.

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    Democrat delenda est
  8. DUMBASS IDEA, EYE NEED CAPSLOCK. by DoninIN · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:The caps lock key doesn't bother me by JonySuede · · Score: 3, Interesting

    when you run the system as single user, custom patch are not an ugly hack, they are a thing of beauty, a symbol of freedom

    --
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  10. Re:WHO CARES? by jmorris42 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    > Because that's an Atom device, not ARM.

    It is also a limited run prototype intended to seed the developer market. If Google puts a stupid Atom into the production hardware I'll lose all respect for them. It runs one application and one plugin. It is ported to ARM as is Flash. Intel hopes to someday (maybe even next year... yeah right) get idle power consumption down to under a watt. You can get some pretty nice ARM SoC solutions that top out at a watt. And that is for everything but the backlight, not just the CPU. These prototypes are three fracking pounds. If that is anything like what is going to ship Google can pack it in now and save everyone the bother.

    Not to mention that if it ships with Intel Inside the pricetag is going to be right in with the modern Windows based netbooks and again, why bother? If they aren't planning to deliver them at retail to end users for $200 in WiFi or free with a 3G data plan then again, Google is far less savy than I have been giving them credit for. To hit those pricepoints ARM is the only option. Intel has no plans to offer a SoC solution anytime in the next couple of years and there are multiple ARM based solutions shipping that have CPU+GPU+3G+WiFi+Bluetooth+Power on the same chip and you can get SoC+RAM+FLASH on a very small module.

    --
    Democrat delenda est
  11. What about one-handed people? by KarlIsNotMyName · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:What about one-handed people? by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 3, Informative

      People incapable of using both hands at once, how are they going to manage comfortably typing all the capital letters without caps-lock?

      Those people can use Sticky Keys for all the modifier keys (including Shift).