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Ask Slashdot: Why Is the Caps Lock Key Still So Prominent On Keyboards?
Esther Schindler writes: The developers at .io are into tracking things, I guess. In any case, a few weeks back they decided to track team performance in terms of keyboard and mouse activity during the working day. They installed a simple Chrome plugin on every Macbook and collected some statistics. For instance, developers have fewer keypresses than editors and managers—around 4k every day. Managers type more than 23k characters per day. And so on. Some pretty neat statistics.
But the piece that jumped out at me was this: "What's curious—the least popular keys are Capslock and Right Mouse Button. Somewhere around 0.1% of all keypresses together. It's time to make some changes to keyboards." I've been whining about this for years. Why is it that the least-used key on my keyboard is not just in a prominent position, but also bigger than most other keys? I can I invest in a real alternate keyboard with a different layout (my husband's a big fan of the Kinesis keyboards, initially to cope with carpal tunnel). But surely it's time to re-visit the standard key layout? What keys would you eliminate or re-arrange?
But the piece that jumped out at me was this: "What's curious—the least popular keys are Capslock and Right Mouse Button. Somewhere around 0.1% of all keypresses together. It's time to make some changes to keyboards." I've been whining about this for years. Why is it that the least-used key on my keyboard is not just in a prominent position, but also bigger than most other keys? I can I invest in a real alternate keyboard with a different layout (my husband's a big fan of the Kinesis keyboards, initially to cope with carpal tunnel). But surely it's time to re-visit the standard key layout? What keys would you eliminate or re-arrange?
The Capslock key inherited the position occupied by the Shift-Lock key. Some keyboards still mark it as shift-lock. In the old mechanical typewriters, the shift lock actually moved the entire framework holding the rack of all the levers that held the letters. It required considerable force to push.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's the most useless key on the entire keyboard. Far above the caps lock key.
1. CapsLock. Grr.
2. The numeric keypad on 15" laptops. Why? Why?! Why?!! It causes the rest of the keys to get scrunched up and moved to unnatural positions, and positions the trackpad offset left upto 3 or 4 inches, which makes for a horrible experience for a right-handed typist. The trackpad should ALWAYS be centered.
3. But please bring back full-size Page Up/Down keys (with maybe a shift action to Begin/End). I'm looking at you, Macbook Pro! Don't run and hide..
Hey, I hardly ever press the power button, lets get rid of that one.
Idiots
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
"They installed a simple Chrome plugin on every Macbook [...] the least popular keys are Capslock and Right Mouse Button"
You don't say!
Demented But Determined.
The Caps Lock is the only key near home row that is explicitly a "toggle" function, and maintains that association across uses (whereas Ctrl, Fn, Alt all need to be held down in combination with other keys). What would be a better default function for this keys beside toggling caps?
Old School Fun Fact: If the computer looks hung or otherwise nonresponsive, if you can toggle the caps lock LED, then the OS is still alive.
Working in IT, and frequently watching desktop users, I was surprised to learn that MANY people actually use the Caps Lock key as shift. To make a capital letter, they will turn on caps, press the letter, then turn off caps. I've see 3 people in the last year do this!
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
"Why Is the Caps Lock Key Still So Prominent On Keyboards?"
HAS THE OP BEEN ON THE INTERNET AT ALL? EVER?
Although, I do like to imagine some of the rage typists are actually holding in the [Shift] key...
So I just tear mine off. Much less frustration.
.
I've tried removing the key top (bruise on my finger when I accidentally hit it).
Why is this throwback to punch cards still around?
really, the cap lock is the least used. I don't know if I have ever used the Scroll Lock key.
Remap it, right?
Just curious, what OS are you using?
On both Windows and Linux, it's a pretty handy key.
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I like to type in ALL CAPS
I can't believe that "Scroll Lock" is used more often than "Caps Lock"
>> least popular keys are...Right Mouse Button
I'm guessing their "developers" don't actually use an IDE. Even on my Mac I use a two-button mouse just to get context-sensitive menus.
I always remap CapsLock to Ctrl. I am an Emacs user.
Caps Lock is rebound to an additional Control key on my Linux and Windows machines. I have a recurring touch of tendinitis in my left wrist and it has made a huge difference.
this makes the caps lock and escape keys switch places
! Swap caps lock and escape
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
keysym Escape = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Escape
add Lock = Caps_Lock
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I can I invest in a real alternate keyboard with a different layout...
You could also invest in a tool to remap the key next to 'A' to "Control," like God intended. You don't need to get a whole new keyboard. Write on the key with a marker if you're the kind of person that looks at key labels when you're typing.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I tap the windows key and start typing the app name all the time for launching apps. Faster for me than using shortcuts.
Just wait until we have brain to pc input, then your worries about archaic keyboard layouts inherited from the days of typewriters will be over.
Now get off my lawn
Epic captcha: backyard
Instead of whining about what's there, why doesn't somebody suggest what they think should be there instead? What needs to be a large key on the left side of the keyboard and isn't currently? I want a tab key on the right side of the keyboard, so this doesn't help.
We talked about this ad naseum back when Chromebooks were about to hit the market. A better question is, why don't keypads (the 10 key-like group of buttons on the right of a PC keyboard) have TAB, SHIFT+TAB and Backspace keys. This would make it much easier to navigate and enter data in web forms and spreadsheets with only one hand. Idunno -- just a thought.
sig: sauer
All hail our nation's glorious 50 cent posters from Korea West!
Shouting is the polite way to show how empty one's brain is.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
SEE??!! YOU CAN ALREADY FEEL THE ANGER RISING UP FROM THE LOUD VOICE!!! Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. ...See??? Slashdot says no when I try to shout. Im sad.
The three keys on the top-right
- Print screen/SysRequest: a poor man's screengrabber at best
- Scroll Lock: does something in MS Office, though I know not what.
- Pause/Break: as far as I know, does absolutely nothing in any application.
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In the light of history, I'm not sure one should draw too many generalizations from the fact that "right mouse button" is the second-least used "key" on the Mac. Getting it added to the mouse at all took decades, and though I don't use Macs often, I wouldn't be on board for making it any smaller.
Besides, saying that you should make the right mouse-button smaller just because it's only used occasionally is like saying toilets should be the size of pickle jars because you only use them a few minutes a day.
Please!
And give us back our reset button, and disk activity light, so I know if the machine froze up! What the hell is the matter with you people?
And you can have my right mouse button when you can pry it from my cold dead hands.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
1. To make it easy to shout in forums
2. Leave a large mostly unused key for vi users to map to ESC/CTL properly.
By leaving the writing on it, it prevents MS from putting a cortana logo on it.
It will be great if it can be some efforts to try to consolidate the keyboards worldwide to have the same number of keys, key shapes and distributions. Why the US Keyboard has a smaller "enter" key compared to the Latin America Keyboard? I fell more important having a big enter key :)
:)
After consolidating the world's keyboards, you can remove with CapsLock key with a knife
I use the capslock all the time. Of course I'm an engineer and I switch between documents (regular case) and drawings (all upper case) so it gets a pretty big workout. Gotta say the same for my right mouse button - and the center scroll, tool. NumLock, though - that's a pretty rare beast for me; typically only gets used when it's accidentally turned off.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
AKA a keylogger.
i'm an i3 user, and i've overriden the caps_lock key to serve as a function key
i use it to assign unique keyboard combinations for the window manager
I didn't read the article (this is slashdot after all), but if it's a chrome plugin, would that register key presses outside the browser? The caps key is basically never used in a browser. On my job, users rely on caps lock to type into forms inside our iseries system.
In my opinion the least used key is the scroll lock and the pause key
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
You'd prefer this, maybe?
That abomination was the keyboard Lenovo inflicted on the world on their Thinkpad Carbon X1 (2nd. gen). This presumably was green-lit by the same Very Serious People who approved the bundling of the SuperFish on "select" laptops.
Lenovo seems to have since learned their lesson; the Carbon X1 3rd gen has a proper keyboard, and proper buttons above the touchpad.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
http://bash.org/?835030
That aside, just don't screw with things. You mention caps lock, which I don't use, but any change is likely to just screw with muscle memory and not have any practical benefit except as some symbolic gesture against caps lock. For example, see second gen X1 carbon which replaced caps lock with home and end keys.
There is also the troubling by the way mention of the right mouse button. For the love of god do not advocate screwing with the right mouse button. You don't often need it, but when you do, all the schemes that try to de-emphasize it's footprint really screw with you and again *nothing of value is gained*.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Obviously caps-lock is the least used key. you press it only once after boot, then no more.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Dude1:"HI GUYS! HOW IS EVERYONE?"
Dude2:"Hey. Doing okay. You?"
Dude1:"COULDN'T BE BETTER! ANYTHING GOING ON?"
Dude2:"There's a caps lock key on your keyboard, press it."
Dude1"OH! THANK YOU! IT'S SO MUCH EASIER TYPING NOW NOT HAVING TO HOLD SHIFT."
God spoke to me
On the newer Latitude laptops, Dell moved the Home and End keys down onto the arrow keys and made them Fn enabled. It is really frustrating because I often use Home and End when editing text, often in conjunction with Shift or Control to manipulate large blocks of text.
This of course has nothing to do with TFA, but this is /. and I need to rant damn it.
i am more frustrated that *nix systems doesnt make a use of it, and just map the same stuff as windows where applicable, its like, we see you have a keyboard with the windows key, all of them?), lets not make use of it and let the user map it themself
no way to argue for caps lock, what with the lameness filter.
I agree it's pretty neat, but do they have this data in a more readable form? As in one, that doesn't have a million cartoon images interspersed with one sentence? I don't mean to be a crank, but I found it difficult to read. Even more so than the regular site!
I started using computers regularly in the time before the "Windows" key was added to the keyboard. So, when it appeared, I refused to use it, out of pique. These days I am always very angry when I do press it, because what I mean to press instead is always either Alt or Ctrl. I personally feel that adding a third key to that set makes it a confusing mess. I initially thought that most users would feel the same way, and that the key would quietly go away when the next year's keyboards came out.
But a lot of people seem to like it, so I guess that's never happening. I will say that, even on Windows, there's usually an alternate keyboard shortcut that makes its use unnecessary.
What I'd really like is some simple and commonly available system that lets you re-map or disable any key on the keyboard at will. That's another problem that I thought would have been fixed by now, but it never really seems to ever become very practical.
One handed usage when reading a long document.
The first thing I do when setting up a new box is to turn that useless key into the control key it should be.
A lot of military reports and first responder reports are still written in all caps.
Keys that never get used ever because they are no longer useful:
Sys Rq
Scroll Lock
Pause/Break
Let's put Caps Lock where Scroll Lock is currently. Caps Lock is occasionally useful but the key word is occasionally. Most of the time it is just annoying and it is WAY too prominent on the keyboard.
Personally I'd get rid of the Windows key too since I never ever use it but I know some people actually do. Freaks... ;-)
Just curious, what OS are you using?
On both Windows and Linux, it's a pretty handy key.
On Windows 8 (I haven't tried 10 yet), its pretty much required, unless you do something goofy like place an icon for every program you might ever want to use on your desktop. Its the "help me find a program" key. If you'd rather search your hard-drive manually, its still much quicker to bring up file explorer with Windows-e rather than hunt down a picture of it on your desktop (closing any possible obscuring windows) and click that.
On the Colemak keyboard layout the Caps Lock has been assigned to work as a 2nd backspace key. This would be much more useful if I remembered to use it.
vi +
This is the opportunity the obscure Dvorak Keyboard crowd has been waiting for to finally fix the layout of keys.
Organize now. Latch on to this issue. Or you'll miss your chance.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
Using our little pinkies to make letters capital is absurd and a strain on them.
Instead the shift key should be below the Space key and thumb operated.
This would allow us to hold the shift down and still type normally. This would also eliminate the need for a CapsLock key, or it could be put somewhere less prominent.
To give you a nice, big, easy-to-reach key you can remap to Control.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
-- My Weblog.
One handed usage when reading a long document.
Do you fap to Business requirements documents?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
The original comment was about a MacBook Pro, on which two finger scrolling is a much more likely way of doing what you're describing.
Oh goodie, another standard keyboard layout. Because getting rid of the "esc" key and putting an additional key in the bottom row worked so well for DEC.
But getting used to yet another keyboard layout... I'll leave that to the keyboard experimenters. I have actual work to do.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
On OSX it's the Apple key which is also very useful.
The context menu key on the other hand...
I find that I use it constantly for two things (aside from start menu access): Windows+E = Brings up File Manager/Windows Explorer Windows+L = Lock screen in one keypress (rather than two using the C-A-D plus mouse click)
Get a screwdriver and just pry the damn thing off the keyboard.
Same with the windows and menu keys. You can still press them by poking something in there (often a pinky works).
On a typewriter, when the caps-lock key was engaged, when you hit the shift key with a letter, you still got a capital letter and it cleared the caps lock. Why in the world did the shift key print lower case letters when the caps-lock key was engaged?
SO THE OLD GEEZERS WHO ONLY GREW UP WITH TELETYPE MACHINES CAN COMMUNICATE WITH ONE ANOTHER.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
WHAT'S THAT YOU SAY?
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
On both Windows and Linux, it's a pretty handy key.
Depends on your workflow. I never use it. If you are someone who really never wants to take your hands off the keyboard I get it but I'm not that person so it sits lonely and unused on my keyboard. Only time I ever press it is by accident or if for some reason I'm forced to use Windows 8 (shudder).
I'm.really.tired.of.the.period.being.closer.to.my.thumb.than.the.space.key.
SO YOU CAN TELL PEOPLE WHAT YOU REALLY THINK
and probably for those steeped in tradition of the KSR machines
P 27Ø159Z AUG 2Ø12
FM NNNØGHA TWO AL
TO NNNØAVL ALABAMA
INFO NNNØAS4 GA
BT
UNCLAS
SUBJ: TROPICAL STORM ISAAC - COMCON THREE
A. ALABAMA ECOM PLAN OF 22 FEB Ø7
BT
mfwright@batnet.com
Make keyboards on laptops with cursor key that don't sink into their surrounding keys - always keep them separate.
I've actually never used the Caps Lock. Why is it even there, what's the point beside historical curiosity?
I've never used the keypad ever at all.
Make the pgup, pgdown, begin, end, etc. keys consistently placed at the same location on every keyboard.
Remove stupid "Sleep", "Shutdown" function keys (god...)
Merge all localized layouts into one standard... I hate switching back and forth to qwerty/azerty. Though diacritics should be more easily accessible (or kept localized)
Because the world doesn't want every idiot who thinks he's made a better keyboard constantly mucking about with stuff for the sake of it.
Some of us have been typing for decades, and simply don't care that you think it's time to redesign the keyboard.
"It's time to make some changes to keyboards" -- No, that's your opinion, it isn't fact.
You want a custom keyboard, buy it or make it. But don't be such an arrogant ass as to assume we give a damn about you whining about it. We don't need some damned keyboard designed by a fucking committee.
What a stupid article.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
its counterpart in the Apple world, the splat key, is extremely useful, however.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Me and my sausage fingers would LOVE to see the backslash key moved even just a few millimeters farther from the enter key. I don't know how many times I've gone to enter a command and I catch the backslash just before the enter, dropping me to > .
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I couldn't care less about the Caps Lock. I rarely use it, but it doesn't bother me.
My frustration is when I use different keyboards, and the Home, End, PgUp, PgDown, and Delete keys are in different places, or are shaped differently (double height delete key, for example). The same goes for arrow keys.
I use the HELL out of the Right Click Context key on my keyboard. I've noticed that Logitech has been replacing that key with a FN key to switch the purpose of F1-F12 to other stupid things no one cares about.
I also use the crap out of the Windows key to start searches or enter UNC paths to get to network resources quickly. Though if it wasn't there, I would learn and use it's alternative shortcut key.
Don't swap the control and alt keys, please. I have to press ^A, ^X, ^C and those are going to be absolutely awkward if the keys are right under each other. Put it where the capslock key is now, so ^A is just shifting my fingers a key left.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
It's also known as the 'agh-bring-me-back-my-game-I-just-grabbed-the-flag!' key.
It's generally useless, but fairly convenient to reach, so it makes perfect sense to map it to the Compose key instead.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,00,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00
Phew, all gone. Finally.
There are a few such combinations.
Win-P switches dual display mode.
Win-D (Aka 'boss key' or 'teacher key') minimises all windows. A second use restores them.
MacBook... No wonder so few people use the right-click button. For me, that right-click is indispensable. It would hinder productivity to lose it, and people would be smart to learn how to take advantage of it. The capslock key is useful too, although less so because many page layout applications now allow you to set text as all caps. Although having that key available is sometimes quicker.
Speed and efficiency is what it comes down to. Just because most users do things a certain way doesn't mean they're doing it properly. I see coworkers constantly doing things inefficiently because they can't be bothered to do a simple online search to find a better approach. It's shocking, actually, because I've seen people stressed out, spending full days to do tasks that should take maybe an hour.
The point of input devices shouldn't be to strip them down to their bare useable minimum. I don't think we need over-designed keyboards with a million buttons, but there is a sensible middle ground that offers reasonable functionality. Removing an underused capslock key isn't going improve anyone's experience, but it will hurt those for whom it's useful. This is not to say I'm opposed to redesigns, but I think they have to be applied holistically and be sensible.
You mention caps lock, which I don't use, but any change is likely to just screw with muscle memory and not have any practical benefit except as some symbolic gesture against caps lock.
You'll get over it. Caps lock needs to be deprecated and relocated. Besides it's not like all keyboards are identical, particularly on laptops. Caps lock takes up lots of space that could be better used. Personally I'd put Home and End in its place or maybe volume controls or perhaps browser forward/back controls.
I have a different (possibly more stupid) question: why are computer numeric keypads and phone keypads reversed from each other? This gets even worse when entering your pin for a bank; I've seen both layouts used by banks. I think the answer is, "That's the way we've always done it!" Somebody made an arbitrary and capricious decision many years ago, and nobody has had the wherewithall to change it. Another "standard" that bothers me: In the transition to digital video, they had the chance to do away with the PAL/NTSC dual-standard nonsense... but they still chose to support both 50 and 60 FPS video?!? As I understand, even 4K video comes in both 50 and 60 frames per second variety, because obviously we still need to synchronize our video to our AC line current...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Right now, CapsLock does one thing. You tap it, and toggle the state of the Caps Lock function. Why not make it do more than one thing, namely by giving it a different function when held down? Perhaps it can act something like AltGr. I personally a held-down CapsLock to generate small caps (via Unicode, so I can't demonstrate here) thanks to AutoHotkey.
I also have other overlapping assignments, such as the AppsKey (aka "Menu Key", which may or may not be what they're calling the "Right Mouse Button" in the article). Tap it and it does the usual. Hold it down and it generates lookalike characters if any exist for that key (otherwise it generates nothing, so you know you didn't get a lookalike), such as a Cyrillic a or capital letters from the Greek alphabet. Why? Because of wordfilters. I encountered one that liked to change all instances of "moot" to "cuck", but it did so with no regard to the characters around the string. Thus the word "smooth" became "scuckh". I dodge this by substituting Cyrillic o in place of one or both of the ones in the word. Another wordfilter I've encountered changes all instances of "wing" to "wang", including when it's part of the word "swing". Time to bust out the Byelorussian "i".
Another option is to map CapsLock to Ctrl (as many people do), or to Backspace (as is the norm in Colemak). I actually use it though, now that it has the additional Small Caps function. I tried the Backspace assignment, but found myself not using it, and now I have a duplicate Backspace to the left of the Left Shift.
Other funky double assignments: NumLock sends a Ctrl-Enter, but only in Skype, otherwise it behaves normally. My numeric keypad is also paired up differently and uses all five rows:
*, 4-Ins, 5-Home, 6-PgUp
-, 1-Del, 2-End, 3-PgDn
+, 0-Ins, Up Arrow,
Ctrl, Left Arrow, Down Arrow, Right Arrow
You can take a look if you really want to.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
They're only useful because everyone got lazy about the existing modifier keys. We already had two in the form of Control and Alternate, and yet we still introduced another for Apple (Command/Apple) and two for the PC (Window and Menu).
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
First of all how am I supposed to yell at people online without the capslock key?
Second, I think most people use the right mouse button all the time regardless of whatever your stupid study says.
However on point for this, it might save some IT calls where people are trying to enter in their passwords, and do not notice that capslock is on... Happens so often that many applications have a built in reminder to check that it is indeed off when trying to enter passwords...
When we played the original DOS-based DOOM under Windows 95 in order to have the network stack we called them "lamer keys". I had two keyboards that I'd pried off the keys and made my own covers to blank them out.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
is the apostrophe. So many people can't tell the difference between its and it's, or worse, how to pluralize correctly.
I think the apostrophe key should be earned.
I altered the keymap so all keys are more useful. Caps lock is escape which I need quite frequently in vim. I have 105 keys (physical German layout) and I would like to have more keys, not less.
I remap my CapsLock key to be a Control key; and RShift-CapsLock to invoke the original caps-lock function.
I think I would remove:
caps lock (standard)
print screen (standard)
scroll lock (standard)
the entire numeric keypad (standard)
insert (standard)
alternate functions for the "F" keys, so they're just F1-F12 again (non-standard)
F-lock key (non-standard)
web/Home (non-standard)
search (non-standard)
mail (non-standard)
1,2,3,4,5,Calculator (non-standard)
zoom (non-standard)
My favorites (non-standard)
I would keep: ...and add "next track" and "previous track"
mute, volume up, volume down, play/pause (non-standard)
I would keep "back" and "forward" ...and add a joystick where "zoom" is that covers scroll up, down, left and right
I would have to look at what's left to figure out what would go where caps-lock was.. maybe home and end.
Then you would just have delete, page up and page down above the arrows, and media keys crammed in above that..
Much smaller keyboard and still great for my purposes without cramming things together and making it cramped.
If someone wants a numeric keypad, I would just buy a separate device.
Yeah.. I'm so going to have to get myself something that's 100% customizable if I'm ever going to get close to what I want. The problem is I really like the physical layout of the main keys on the 4000 pro.... Split keyboard with a slight seagull like affect.. Everything feels like it's in its most natural position.
a ".com" key. Which shifts to .org and alts to .net
and I wouldn't mind a button that sends focus tot he url address bar and another to the search bar.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It seems like its time to RETURN to the standard keyboard layout, with the control key on the left where the caps-lock key got moved, and the caps loc off in the lower left corner (where ctrl got relegated). That WAS the standard key layout used by everybody (including Apple with the AppleII) before IBM got into the business and screwed everything up...
The caps lock only needs to be pressed twice per string of text. Once to turn it on, once to turn it off. That means, I could hit the caps lock and type out 500 E's. That would be +500 E, but only +2 for capslock. If he really wants to bicker, he should have complained about the Scroll Lock. That button is on the verge of death.
Control and alternate already have well-defined meanings. Control is for entering control characters, alternate is for entering alternate characters. OS X uses both. UNIX keyboards used to come with a meta key, but this fell out of use as software was written for PCs without such a key. On OS X, the usage of the command key is inherited from classic MacOS: It's the modifier that you hold for commands. This means that the OS X terminal is the only graphical terminal that I've come across that doesn't suck for copy and paste. On OS X, every single program including the terminal uses command-C for copy and command-V for paste. The terminal is therefore free to use control-C for sending the character that they terminal recognises for SIGINT. Windows overloaded the alternate key for opening menus, which meant that it is no longer a convenient key if you need to enter non-ASCII characters (for example, a Euro symbol or a letter with an accent, which are both easy to enter on a Mac). Most desktop environments for Linux inherited a load of bad UI design from Windows before adding their own mistakes.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You'll sometimes hear it referred to as the "Super Key" in Linux circles and it can be a useful extra modifier for specific tasks. I have to use Windows on my work machine where I use it to get the run dialog in a single-handed key combo or, on the rarest occasions I use it, an explorer window. I also have super+space mapped to run launchy.
Windows-R brings up the run dialog, which will autocomplete program names and used to be the fastest way of launching programs on Windows (it's well over 10 years since I last regularly used Windows, so I don't know if this has changed). Windows-D showed the desktop and Windows-F the system find dialog. All of these were pretty useful, but the key was still quite under-utilised.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Why is the brake pedal so big? I hardly ever use it. Mostly just the gas pedal. Maybe we should move it, and make it smaller.
CAPTCHA: CONTROLS
Despite some other weirdness the second generation Lenovo X1 Carbon doesn't have a caps lock key. Instead you hit shift twice and an LED on the shift button lights up. They said this was to match the behavior on mobile devices. I rather like it. They put home and end in it's place, which I always look for in the other side of the keyboard. I wish they'd do away with caps lock on their other keyboards, but maybe rethink what they replace it with, maybe an 'any' key?
I never understood the hate for the Windows key. Well, sure as a youthful Linux user I was snobbish when it was introduced, but after mapping it to something useful I started disliking keyboards without it.
What I'd really like is some simple and commonly available system that lets you re-map or disable any key on the keyboard at will.
xmodmap works well for basic key remapping. If you want to do funky stuff like make it per-keyboard instead of global (useful for UK/US keyboard differences for example) then setxkbmap is really handy.
You can pseudo-disable a key by mapping it to None. It has minor effects, like triggering a key event but it will never do anything.
Of course that only works on X based systems, but it's really handy.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
There are still places where the use of Caps is mandatory and used on a daily basis. I work for a telephone company in Alaska and all the phone switches back end access requires all the commands to be entered in Caps. True, the use is rare and limited, but there is still a use for the Caps Lock.
Every new keyboard I use, first thing I do is pluck the capslock key out so I don't hit it by mistake. I tape it to the back in case anyone else ever needs it. I basically never miss it.
When I'm reading a document, I'll do two-fingered scrolling on the trackpad to navigate. I only use home/end and page up/down when I'm typing, to navigate within the document, and then I already have both of my hands on the keyboard. The function key can be pressed with the knuckle of the little finger of the left hand, so is pretty easy to hit.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
i JUST REMOVED MINE FROM THE KEYBOARD. NOT SO PROMINENT ANYMORE.
It's actually really easy to turn Caps Lock into Control (or Command) on OSX; it's in the Keyboard preference panel, under the button "Modifier Keys".
You will not take my context menu key until you pry it from my cold dead fingers. I use that thing constantly. Maybe I use applications that hide an inordinate amount of functionality under the context menu (including my own). I really try to avoid moving my hands from the keyboard to the mouse (and back) until I absolutely have to, so I'm all about keyboard shortcuts. The context menu key is a handy one, for me at least.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
In Canada, some laptops ship with French/English Keyboards. For some reason, hardware manufactures thought it was ok to shrink the left shift key to half of the normal size. As a touch typist this drives me insane as I end up typing a backslash instead of hitting shift for an uppercase letter. If anything they should use backslash just to the left of the "a" and shrink caps lock and not shift.
What I'd really like is some simple and commonly available system that lets you re-map or disable any key on the keyboard at will. That's another problem that I thought would have been fixed by now, but it never really seems to ever become very practical.
With Windows, you can simply use a small freeware tool called 'KeyTweak' for re-mapping/disabling keys. It will just change some registry entries, so you only need to run it when you want to change the key mappings. It's working from Win NT4.0 to Windows 8.1 (I haven't tested it with Windows 10 yet). I've used it on a couple of PCs to disable the Windows key, and to remap its functionality to the scroll-lock key instead.
Windows+L sounds pretty handy. I didn't know that one. You can also lock with Ctrl-Alt-Del and then Alt-K, to avoid having to grab the mouse.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
It would be handy to have an Enter key on the left side, so that when I am using only my left hand (maybe my right hand is operating the mouse), I can easily hit Enter. It is a little silly that there are two Enter keys on the right, and none on the left.
On top of opening the start menu, there's tons of Win-letter combinations. Win-R is Run, Win-E is explorer, Win-D shows the desktop, Win-M minimizes all windows. Win-1,2,n launches the 1st, 2nd, nth program pinned to your taskbar. Win-arrows move windows around on the screen and Win-shift-arrows move windows between different monitors. There's plenty of others that I don't remember. It's actually pretty inconvenient to not have a windows key once you're used to it.
My dear, I would put 'U' and 'I' together (I use a right-handed Dvorak)
Seriously though, I'd recommend ditching caps lock, tab, insert, num lock, home, end, page up, page down, scroll lock, pause/break, and roll the delete and backspace keys into a single delete key. Then make all the remaining ones bigger. I'd also take the damnable Windows logo off the command key and just refer to it as CMD across operating systems.
I think you need to look at the first Mac keyboard. There was no "control" key. Just the Command and Option keys. The Command key was for keyboard shortcuts and the Option key was to enter special characters (accents, extra symbols, etc). They later added the "Control" key where the caps lock key is typically located now and moved "caps lock" to a tiny button next to the space bar. This was done to be compatible with terminal applications.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Indeed. Maybe it is a useful key to have, but it is in a terrible location. I fear the day that using it becomes a requirement to use a computer, as I will no longer be able to rip it off of every keyboard I own.
I use my caps lock as much as the windows key / command key / super key, and both I use more than the other windows key (menu key?)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
But really though, I use it all the time. It's good for acronyms for a start.
I notice you're not talking about getting rid of RMB. That would obviously be stupid. People who know what they're doing and do alot of it get a great deal out of 0.1% use cases.
Back in the day the CAPSLock key used to have a red LED on it that was lit when it was on.
Of course that made the keyboards more expensive to produce - they cost 10 x what they do today.
And the key next to the A key was the control key
The Windows key does nothing on Windows 3.11
I never understood the hate for the Windows key.
Then you've never played a FPS on a PC. It would be one thing if the key could be disabled while you are doing a specific task but short of editing the registry it just sits there...mocking you; Waiting for just the right moment when you line up your shot and BAM your looking at the desktop.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
You want to fix the "problem", require an explicit shift modifier. (Or some other layout appropriate modifier) It even makes conceptual sense. Use shift to uppercase a letter. Use shift+lock to lock in that caps.
Simple. Problem solved. You're welcome, Inter Net.
It depends per user. Coming from Linux, I use keys a lot more than other people do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That said, I just bought a Roccat Tyon and am using 12 buttons on a regular basis. Note: I am not a gamer.
Having programable buttons on a mouse is great. As a keyboard I have a Happy Hacker keyboard. So no easily accesible CapsLock there.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Are you telling me you have noting assigned to super or hyper? Do you have *anything* in your modmap?
Kids these days!
Try typing Ä or Ü or È on a swiss-german keyboard without Capslock.
Believe it or not there are more letters than 7-bit ASCII and there are more keyboard layouts than ANSI.
Just remap your Caps-Lock key to the Compose key.
http://fsymbols.com/keyboard/l...
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I love the Caps Lock key. I just happen to swap it with Escape, which is very handy when using vi or many other programs (even bash, where some key combinations use Escape). I was very sad when Google got rid of it on some early Chromebooks. I think it's great that such a prime piece of keyboard real estate is unused, because it let's people repurpose it for whatever they want.
Would that the Caps Lock Key were repurposed as another Function Key.
As I type this on my MacBook Pro, I notice that ALL of the Function Keys are overloaded. What is so special about the Caps Lock Key that it wouldn't be overloaded? I usually end up disabling it: System Preferences>Keyboard>Keyboard>Modifiers Keys>Caps Lock>No Action. At least this prevents me from accidentally locking my caps which I NEVER EVER want to do.
The caps lock key is necessary when I have to type a password with upper case characters while holding my coffee mug. Don't get rid of it.
On modern keyboards, the CAPSLOCK key holds the KeyIntercept&Reporting circuit inserted by the NSA.
Yours,
ES
"Sometime around 1985"? Actually a couple of years before that.
Listen' up, young uns, and I'll give you some history.
The computer world until the early 1980s was largely divided between the IBM EBCDIC/coax block mode terminals and ASCII/serial.
IBM block-mode (3278) keyboards had no CTRL key, and two return keys - one for typical carriage return when entering text, and the ENTER key to signal that all fields on the block-mode screen were filled and to transmit them. All the ASCII stuff including most of the original personal computers had the CTRL key in that position, or required a separate ASCII terminal. Some early ASCII terminals didn't even have backspace or return keys - you used CTRL-H and CTLM-M. Still works in many applications. Us old-timers were accustomed to it and could keep our hands in the touch typing position. Find your nearest proficient, old-timer vi user for a demo of how fast you can edit code with a properly placed CTRL key.
Then IBM came out with their PC. They had to add a CTRL key because lots of applications used it - Wordstar for instance. But they also wanted to sell it into the corporate IBM corporate customers. So they left the caps lock key where IBM terminal users expected it to be. And they tucked the CTRL key down below the shift key.
A truly wretched layout. But the IBM PC was a big hit, and everyone rushed to copy it.
You can still buy keyboards with a DIP switch to swap the CTRL and Caps Lock keys.
I'm tired of every other laptop having arrow keys that are so tiny and weak that it makes software development impossible. These, along with the Home and End buttons are my bread & butter. So who here knows the old alternative for Ctrl-C Ctrl-V that still works in almost every application? I like it even more than Ctrl-C/V.
Like the right mouse button (doesn't exist), the Caps Lock key isn't used on Mac devices because it doesn't work. For some reason, in order to activate or deactivate the capslock function it requires several sub-seconds to activate. Simple key-presses won't register its function. Whenever I need this function I find I need to look for the light. It's not a huge problem, but it usually nullify the advantage over just holding the shift key.
I started using computers regularly in the time before the "Windows" key was added to the keyboard. So, when it appeared, I refused to use it, out of pique.
I have to bring that statement into question.
If you really did use computers back in the day before Windows, you would already know that key - called Super - has existed since the 80s and was first removed on the IBM 8800 computer, which it remained missing until Microsoft requested keyboard manufacturers to put the Super key back and stick their logo on it.
Unix systems used and still use Super as an extra modifier similar to Hyper, Meta, Alt, AltGr, and Control.
The classic Macs used it as the "open apple" / command key, which was used for keyboard shortcuts leaving Control free to insert control characters as originally intended.
Sun had a dedicated key on the left-hand function keys.
LISP programmers have said they can't live without Meta.
Even emacs remaps the keycode back in for command shortcuts.
Personally when the key REappeared I was quite happy, as any cheap-o $10 keyboard would have similar functionality to any 104-key keyboard in the past, and no longer commanded higher prices to get.
Thanks, I may take a look at that. Though I suppose what has most discouraged me from trying key-remappers over the years is the fact that they're all "freeware", and my mind has a filter that automatically translates "freeware" to "download this registry-editing system utility from some scary filesharing site and then run it in administrator mode, we promise nothing bad will happen, heh heh". I used to think I could avoid being pwned by malware by only downloading such things from Sourceforge, but in our modern age of "special offers", that seems to no longer be the case.
This made me think of a large subset of users who probably like caps lock - people with various disabilities who may find it hard or impossible to press two keys at once.
When drawing conclusions from statistics, one must think carefully about where those stats come from. Developers would do good to remember that not all computer users are exactly like them.
I'm using CapsLock as a layout switching key, lots of other people use it as a second 'esc'.
And why would you remove it, anyway?
It used to be in the "right" location, where the control key is;
likewise, the control key used to be where the CAPs lock key is.
Thanks Obama!
As a person who uses C-preprocessor extensively, I need my capslock key.
Jokes aside, I often program these industrial robots where basically every variable is a macro-define on bare memory address. The macro system doesn't know about tokens, but thankfully thinks case matters, so I use all caps on my variables to reduce name clashes.
I went six months without the use of my left hand because of an injury. During that time I used the "caps lock" key extensively. I know I'm not the only one who had to use it at some point in time. Some people will always need access to it.
Are you seriously hoping to make a change that will mess with the unfortunate because YOU don't require it? Maybe they should spend extra to get a special keyboard after the "caps lock" is removed? Was there a study done to see how many people use handicap ramps?
So we can fuck up, duh.
...Whenever I am programming it is very useful when creating Constant variables as the naming convention for such variables is all caps. I wonder if any surveys of key presses takes into account that caps lock, once pressed, is in use until it's pressed again. Therefore all keys pressed after Caps Lock is pressed, until it's pressed again, should also be counted in usage statistics (imho).
I find it very useful, but I truly HATE its position on the keyboard.
The problem with reworking keyboard layouts is the current layouts are good enough. Good enough, in that most people have learned to type with them and are familiar with the layouts. Muck about with the layout much at all and there's a significant cost involved in adopting the new layout as these people's productivity decreases as their typing speeds decrease while adjusting to the new layout.
I don't think there's another keyboard layout out there (currently designed or possible) sufficiently better, objectively, to over come this.
Yes! The context menu button is the best part of the 104 key layout. I use it very often, and it would be terrible to see it go.
So what if the Caps Lock key gets pressed only 0.1% of the time (according to your silly analytics)?
In fact, the keyboard I'm now using has a Calculator button, and volume control buttons. Do they disgust you?
I swear that some people are making up stupid crap as real work in order to justify their own insubstantial existence.
another hipsteriffic unreadable blogsite spammer
I categorize what I consider "danger keys" and have my endless bouts with them. A "danger key" is any key that carries a heavy burden of control over system ("heavy danger") or performance ("light danger").
Heavy danger keys include F1, F3, Escape, Break, and Delete.
Light danger keys include Capslock, F12, Insert, Shift, and Numlock.
Some of these dangers are clearly the fault of system developers at Microsoft. F1 didn't have to be chosen as a key that will slow your system down trying to open up Windows' top-heavy and useless help system. F3 didn't have to be chosen as a key that will slow your system down trying to open up Windows' top-heavy and useless search window. So those don't have to be danger keys, but they are. Whenever I accidentally press one of them I kick myself.
But other keys like Delete are hard to blame anyone for. Delete always means "remove something". If you aren't careful of where your focus is, that "something" could be a valuable file or one character out of a password.
The Break key is a holdover from pre-threaded computing. Windows users don't need it and CLI users probably don't want to ever have to press it, and certainly don't want to press it accidentally.
The Escape key is one I really hate. It's close to a key I actually use a lot, the Tilde/Gravemark. And because its location is more or less considered remote, programmers feel safe in continuing to make it a dangerous key to press. There should never be a key that I can accidentally press that will eliminate all the work I'm trying to do.
Capslock poses a threat to performance. I often type while looking at a paper or book, I'm trained to type quickly and accurately and I don't always look at the screen. There's nothing worse than looking up and seeing reversed case for paragraphs. Luckily I use an editor that has a "reverse case" feature, but it still hurts performance to have to go back and correct the error even with an instant fix like that. It hurts performance even if you catch it when it happens, pause, and click it again to go back.
F12 hurts performance because it is almost always associated with "full-screen view". Not all apps come out of full-screen well behaved. Hell, not all apps go into full-screen well behaved. Some apps lose some functionality in full-screen. Many apps lose important things like menu bars, status bars, and scroll bars. Many apps, when in full-screen, force themselves to be "always on top" which effectively robs you of your ability to change system focus. I prefer apps that put something heavy like full-screen view behind a two-key combination like Alt+Enter. I'd prefer if all programmers adopted the Alt+Enter combo for full-screen, because sometimes full-screen is something I enjoy over-using at certain moments, but it's not something I want to accidentally happen when I'm trying to type simple math or break a sentence with an emdash, or write an underscore.
Insert hurts performance because most text editors allow a single press of Insert to immediately change whether you're in over-write or insert mode. It doesn't get used for much else in my life but I feel like Shift+Insert would be a better match for something like that. I'd prefer Insert did something more like delete does, and insert a space after the carat. I could deal with that -- at the end of my day I'd just select and delete all the built-up trailing space at the end of my document. Most apps these days don't even effectively give you any sign of what mode you're in, so it's not like you have any way of knowing until you see something going horribly wrong. Go ahead and try it right now: hit "insert" and see if your carat changes to give you a visual cue of what mode you're in. It probably doesn't.
I'm also a fan of faint, special characters at the ends of lines showing whether there's a carriage return, a linefeed or both, but we can't have everything.
Shift hurts performance because of one thing and one thing only: "sticky keys". I often hesitate before forming a sentence
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Pressing the Windows logo key is equivalent to Ctrl+Esc - it opens the "start" menu on Windows 95 and later operating systems. It also functions as a modifier key which is all-but-guaranteed not to have a meaning imposed by specific applications (unlike Ctrl and Alt, which apps all use for internal shortcuts) so you can safely use it for global hotkeys. Windows has several of these built-in - for example, you can press Win+E to launch Explorer, or Win+R to open the Run dialog, Win+D to hide all windows to expose the desktop, Win+T to give keyboard focus to the taskbar (this is extremely useful, but not widely-known) or Win+L to lock your computer.
It's a handy key, but is horribly-positioned on the keyboard - especially the one on the left, and especially when playing games.
Anyone who has every supported customer service/callcenter/sales/service reps that have to enter data into Oracle can tell you that the CapsLock key gets used daily and would result in an "unacceptable" work environment if removed. Obviously it would be better if such systems just default to accepting all text entry as being in caps if that's what the company desires, but that would require hiring another 10,000-20,000 Indian programmers for 6 years to get accomplished, per company.
What I don't understand is how they conclude that managers type more and developers type less? They used a chrome plug in... the only thing they can conclude is that manager surf and chat more than developers...
I don't always use the Caps Lock key, but when I do, it's usually on accident.
On my computer at work, I got so fed up that I pried off the Caps Lock key. I also pried off the Insert key, a key I never press on purpose. I was much happier.
Of course, checking how often Mac users use the right mouse button would really skew things, would it not? Besides, popularity and usefulness are not the same thing. If a two men were standing on a street corner handing out money and one was handing out free $20s while the other was handing out free $10s, which would be more popular? Probably the one giving out $20s. Does that mean the $10 bill isn't useful?
The reality is that there are some very good use cases for the caps-lock (as others have pointed out). If it isn't hurting anything where it is, then why move it? What other key would you put there that you would want to hit with your pinky to do something else, that most people would find as a useful improvement? Right now if I accidentally hit the caps lock, I get capital letters -- a nuisance but not terrible. What if you replace it with the ctrl or alt key as some have suggested? There could be far worse ramifications.
Regardless, popularity does not dictate usefulness. Chances are, you will never have to use the flotation device on an airplane or the oxygen max. Based on frequency of use, they must not be very popular. However, for the right user case, they are very useful.
I like to open folders with win-e, alt-d, type path. I do it very often.
I do! The FreeBSD terminal uses a Scroll Lock tap to freeze the screen so that you can go back and read those make or gcc messages or warnings you just missed with the arrow keys. Another press of Scroll Lock returns you back to your prompt (or output, if you are still processing). LED is also usful to tell you what status you are in. Works great ...
Until you put your server on a KVM that uses Scroll Lock to select the current server or skip to the next server. So, do those Mac keyboards not have Scroll Lock, Break, and Print Screen? Other than those users using Greenshot or Gadwin ScreenPrint, how could they be using those keys...
Ah, I remember now - those are F13, F14, and F15. Except that the F-keys are hidden under other items like brightness up/down, volume up/down, screen mirror/extend and so on. So, why didn't researcher note those?
As for SUN keyboard layouts (USB variant plugged into Windows 7) - I like the Control Key placement(where caps lock is now). Escape is acceptable (replaces tilde & grace accent key). But that Backspace key! What were they smoking!
Sun Hardware Designer 1: "Most of Sun terminal app users use Ctrl-H and DEL anyway, so lets make the Backspace key the size of every other key, and put it UNDER the BackSlash key. So when a Windows user users our keyboard, every time he goes for BackSlash, he'll hit Backspace instead!"
Sun Hardware Designer 2: "That's great boss, my idea is to switch the position of the Super and Alt keys. Lets also shrink that BackSlash down and put a tilde/grave key there, too!"
Sun Hardware Designer 1: "Splendid, we'll keep people locked into using our servers forever because our design is so superior!"
Tongue firmly in cheek there, for those not getting it. I do like Caps Lock swtiched with Ctrl, though. That's very nice, and really is superior. I just wish those other keys weren't moved about. For those wondering what generation, there's a tiny Sun Sparc 4m that this is supposed to go with. The USB mouse doesn't work with Windows - maybe it needs a reflective pad?, but the keyboard works great.
i use right mouse click constantly and have my own ideas about people who've never seen a contextual menu.
I depend on the caps lock key - and not just for being cool. I tap the shit out of that key while coding anything like constants that need 3+ big letters in a row. Ain't nobody got time for Shift Dancing long consts.
My Happy Hacking Professional 2 keyboard has a control key in the place where a caps lock key usually goes.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The CAPS LOCK key is there because some posters need to be reminded to TURN IT OFF so they can get past the /. lameness filter.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
It's still the fastest way in Windows 7, 8 & 10 + all of the server versions.
They surveyed the keystrokes of 5 entire people and want to draw conclusions?
There's nothing wrong with caps lock. It's just that there's very little need to type words ALL IN CAPS in normal conversations, email, or even development. Shocking, I know.
Just like God intended.
The tested less than 10 people. Caps lock has not been established as the least used key. Took ten people, all using Macs to determine that the keyboard needs a change. LMFAO. You've gotta be effin kidding me.
It's called "command" and the key predates both OS X and even the Windows key.
It's convenient. You might be typing with one hand, for example. Please don't take the caps lock away from me because you want everything to be popular.
There are two shift keys. Unless you have tiny, tiny hands, you can reach one of them with one hand that also reaches the key you want to shift. It's not even terrible hard--much easier, for example, than a one-octave split on a piano.
However because copy and past are cmd-C and cmd-V, it means you can still use cntr-C in a terminal and do proper copy past like in every other apple application.
Try this one out: remap the upper numeric keys from numbers to the symbols they have above the numbers. When you need a number, hit shift to get the numbers or use the numeric keypad.
I find it very annoying to hold down shift so often while coding. I almost never use the upper-row numbers as numbers, but I hit a lot of symbols coding in C and C++. I definitely use the symbols more, why do I have to hit shift to get to them?
Just look at a hunk of your favorite OSS project's code. Are there more numbers or symbols?
Granted, any facebook/gmail computer user wouldn't get this at all...
I'd like to meet whoever decided to put caps lock next to shift and shake him warmly by the throat.
I'd like to add that IBM wasn't alone. ADDS terminals had a caps lock key too.
The old ADM terminals had the control key where the caps lock would have been. Apple and Atari copied the ADM layout (I think they used the same keyboard manufacturer) while Commodore had a caps lock (actually shift lock) on their computers.
The Windows key is pretty damned useful in day-to-day activities: (Not sure which are Windows 8 or newer, but many were in 7 as well )
I for one make use of:
Windows - LEFT, Windows - RIGHT : Snap half-screen left / Move to next Monitor;
Windows - UP, Windows DOWN : Maximize, Minimize
Windows SHIFT UP, Win-Shift-Down : Maximize/Restore Vertical only. (Width stays the same, only window height maximizes/restores)
Windows - Print Screen: Screenshot and save to file
Windows - X : Power Menu (Admin Command Promt, Control Panel, Shutdown/Hibernate/Sleep, etc)
Windows : Windows 8 Screen (Start typing to search for application to run)
Windows - L : Lock Screen (I use this at work, not at home)
Windows - P : Second Monitor Mode (Duplicate, Mirror, Laptop Only, Second Monitor Only)
Windows - D : Show Desktop (Minimize All) / If you don't need to open a new app, a second press will undo the minimize all
Windows - SPACE : Keyboard Language Selector (Probably not useful for americans); I use it for Intl Dvorak, US English, JP IME
Windows - / : IME Recovert (Good for ZH, JP, KR)
Windows - E : New File Explorer Window
Windows - R : [ No longer useful - Open RUN box; Windows-SPACE has fully replaced this by allowing full text-search of all installed applications]
Windows - PAUSE : Bring up System Properties Screen (usually for debugging hardware issues, or seeing stats)
Windows - 1, 2, 3, 4 : (effectively click) Open/Switch to application pinned on task bar at position 1, 2, 3, 4...
Windows Shift - 1, 2, 3, 4: (effective shift-click) New instance of pinned task-bar application at specificed location
[ These two I only use Windows 2, to open my IDE; pretty much everything else I just use Windows + (start typing app name) ]
Windows - Alt - Enter : Open Windows Media Center
Alt-Tab : Cycle through open windows
AltGr-Tab : Use keyboard to cycle through all windows in pop-up window; enter to actually switch. (Apparently, americans can use Ctrl-Alt-Tab for this)
And there are many more Windows-Key shortcuts that I don't use; or probably don't even know about.
BECAUSE SOMETIMES YOU JUST NEED TO SHOUT, GODDAMNIT. /lolslashdot "Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING."
-Styopa
I've never really had that problem of hitting it on accident while gaming unless I was really frantic or horribly misaligned my fingers on the keys (at which point I'd be dead anyway so I never saw it as an issue). I had the opposite problem though once I got my G15. I'd use the switch on the keyboard to toggle it off, then forget to turn it on again and hit win+r-->type program name-->enter-->"wtf why is this random program on my desktop launching that's nowhere near what I typed???"
The Windows key is pretty damned useful in day-to-day activities: (Not sure which are Windows 8 or newer, but many were in 7 as well )
I for one make use of:
Windows - LEFT, Windows - RIGHT : Snap half-screen left / Move to next Monitor;
Windows - UP, Windows DOWN : Maximize, Minimize
Windows SHIFT UP, Win-Shift-Down : Maximize/Restore Vertical only. (Width stays the same, only window height maximizes/restores)
Windows - Print Screen: Screenshot and save to file
Windows - X : Power Menu (Admin Command Promt, Control Panel, Shutdown/Hibernate/Sleep, etc)
Windows : Windows 8 Screen (Start typing to search for application to run)
Windows - L : Lock Screen (I use this at work, not at home)
Windows - P : Second Monitor Mode (Duplicate, Mirror, Laptop Only, Second Monitor Only)
Windows - D : Show Desktop (Minimize All) / If you don't need to open a new app, a second press will undo the minimize all
Windows - SPACE : Keyboard Language Selector (Probably not useful for americans); I use it for Intl Dvorak, US English, JP IME
Windows - / : IME Recovert (Good for ZH, JP, KR)
Windows - E : New File Explorer Window
Windows - R : [ No longer useful - Open RUN box; Windows-SPACE has fully replaced this by allowing full text-search of all installed applications]
Windows - PAUSE : Bring up System Properties Screen (usually for debugging hardware issues, or seeing stats)
Windows - 1, 2, 3, 4 : (effectively click) Open/Switch to application pinned on task bar at position 1, 2, 3, 4...
Windows Shift - 1, 2, 3, 4: (effective shift-click) New instance of pinned task-bar application at specificed location
[ These two I only use Windows 2, to open my IDE; pretty much everything else I just use Windows + (start typing app name) ]
Windows - Alt - Enter : Open Windows Media Center
Alt-Tab : Cycle through open windows
AltGr-Tab : Use keyboard to cycle through all windows in pop-up window; enter to actually switch. (Apparently, americans can use Ctrl-Alt-Tab for this)
And there are many more Windows-Key shortcuts that I don't use; or probably don't even know about.
Full list of short-cuts apparently at : http://windows.microsoft.com/e...
HULK HATE CAPS LOCK. ALWAYS HITTING BY MISTAKE! Oh sorry. Hulk hates caps lock. Always hitting by mistake!
On one IBM laptop I was so exasperated by caps lock that I did a registry hack to effectively nullify the key.
I used to shake my head at some of the old IBM 3270 mainframe consoles that had a physical rocker switch to convert lower case displayed to upper case. As I recall though, if you were typing in case-sensitive stuff, it would display as upper case but actually the bytes entered would represent the lower case characters (unless you remembered to use shift of course).
IMHO, it's the alt key.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
Damn, I take that back! It's the stupid menu key between right alt and right ctrl. 99.99999% of the time I've hit that was on accident. The other time was just to see what it would do.
Capslock is one of the few stateful keyboard keys. But apart from some old-fashioned keyboards that had LEDs in the Capslock and Numlock keys, that state is hidden or only shown at a place (top of keyboard, or on screen) far from the key that toggles it. Keys that behave like a switch should look like a switch, where you can tell at a glance whether it's on or off. A control that toggles state without changing its own appearance is just broken UI.
The right mouse button, on the contrary, is extremely useful. Context menus depend on the object or area covered by the pointer, not on what object might have "focus". Focus is often hard to see, it's also often meaningless, and having to give something focus first in order to interact with is clumsy and error-prone: Clicking on an object to give it focus might already trigger some unintended action. Right-click doesn't require focussing, and context menus are fully discoverable. "What can I do with this thing I'm pointing at" is object-oriented thinking. It's much more specific than "let's browse the menus and toolbars to see what functions this program offers".
From my cold, dead, hands will you take away my right mouse button. A single button mouse was a complete waste. You have to use two hands to access a function(one keyboard, one mouse), if you don't have a right mouse button.
Only scrubs hit the windows key when playing.
Windows overloaded the alternate key for opening menus, which meant that it is no longer a convenient key if you need to enter non-ASCII characters (for example, a Euro symbol or a letter with an accent, which are both easy to enter on a Mac).
I don't know how it works on a Mac, but entering alternate characters is still easy with Windows, even 8.1. (I haven't tried it on 10.) Rather, I consider it pretty easy. :-) Just hold down the ALT key, type in the four-digit code for the character you want, then release the ALT key and your character will show up. A Euro sign is ALT+0128, for example. â. (That would show up as proper Euro, except this is slashdot. -roll eyes-) Doesn't matter if numlock is on or off, doesn't matter what you might be doing with a menu at the time.
The position of the Tab, Shift, and Caps Lock are a relic of the typewriter era. Keyboard makers didn't bother changing it for the mundane reason that it "just works" or, to put it another way: "if it isn't broken, don't fix it." Laziness pure and simple.
I've been using some random ergonomic keyboard (with Windows key included) for over a year without realizing that 1) it didn't have a context-menu key, and 2) that's where the 'fn' key lived, which apparently makes my f-keys do weird undesirable things. So...I guess my curiosity towards "what happens if I try to put the menu key into my workflow" will have to wait for a different keyboard.
Who decided to move it way up into the upper-left netherworld of the keyboard? IBM? Microsoft? It used to be where the Cap Lock key is now, and in that position is was very handy, especially when using vi.
You could likely add a function in to the wiring or logic that would have a double-tap of Shift turn on capslock.
I've seen it done with Fn keys where a double tap would turn on an audible sound when you press Fn key combinations.
It could even still be used as a crash activity detector like you can usually do with any of the state keys with an LED.
Generally I just use capslock as a hotkey modifier for various functions in programs.
Capslock as a hotkey is great because it doesn't interfere with hotkeys already defined in almost any program.
I use it for various things, like window management, quick saving certain things, macros for drawing and such.
I also use it to slow my mouse to speed1 when I hold. Incredibly useful for quick and precise editing of text, pictures, 3D modelling and so on. I've been using it for years now.
I am an engineer. It is still standard for engineering drawings, schematics, instructions, and annotations to be in capital letters.
I use caps lock every day for work. That might explain why the caps lock key isn't commonly used on Macs.
My Osborne 1 split the capslock key into two regular-sized keys, one for CTRL and the other for capslock. That worked well. (And I really miss Wordstar. Amazing what they could cram into 64k. They had to play silly games, loading and unloading parts of the software from the floppy disk, a really primitive kind of virtual memory.)
Several Keyboard layouts have 4 shift states. CAPS !== SHIFT.
See Czech and Swiss German for common examples.
the upper row of CZ are letters.
SHIFT gets you 123457890
CAPS: gets uppercased letters
CAPS-Shift: numbers again
Swiss:
Shift ü = è
CAPS ON: Shift Ü = È
If you get rid of the caps lock, you'll have to introduce a common dual-state key for the dozens of languges that require it.
Niche environments.
Like the country of Switzerland; or the Czech Republic.
Several Keyboard layouts have 4 shift states. CAPS !== SHIFT.
See Czech and Swiss German for common examples.
the upper row of CZ are letters.
SHIFT gets you 123457890
CAPS: gets uppercased letters
CAPS-Shift: numbers again
Swiss German:
Shift ü = è
CAPS ON: Shift Ü = È
If you get rid of the caps lock, you'll have to introduce a common dual-state key for the dozens of languges that require it.
Still a problem. Games can be programmed to ignore the windows key, but that don't help old games. Good thing gaming keyboards usually have a toggle button or switch to disable it.
You can still buy keyboards with a DIP switch to swap the CTRL and Caps Lock keys.
On the Mac you just go into the Keyboard control panel and switch the modifiers to your heart's content. I never use Caps Lock for anything, so I make it do nothing.
FIRST POST.
There's one other option. You could get a gamer keyboard. I got one from Corsair(the other guys are great too just don't go for off brand) that is extremely customizable. The software is very easy to use and updated. You could make any key do anything... Even set off a chain of macros or just switch profiles or play a sound or nothing at all.
Imagine that, every time you hit the windows key Homer yells d'oh, but other than that nothing happens.
The Windows key is pretty damned useful in day-to-day activities:
I for one make use of:
That's quite a long list and I have NO interest in memorizing all that. If it works for you that's great but personally I detest arbitrary keyboard shortcuts. I use a handful that are common but to me its a sign of a poorly designed system. If the interface is so clumsy you need to memorize a page long list of shortcuts then I'll just use something else. It's a big part of why I detest both vi and emacs.
(For the record I also hate tiny icons you have to mouse over to figure out their function)
let the user map it themself
The horror. Letting the user decide what to do with the typically three extra keys? Can't have that.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
THIS.
Shift + Letter yields --- DIFFERENT Lowercased Letters!
Shift ä = à
Shift ö = é
Shift ü = è
To get uppercased version of any of those letters, you have to turn Caps Lock on.
With CAPS ON:
Shift Ä = À
Shift Ö = É
Shift Ü = È
because it makes a great super key.
I understand the desire to protect your families and property, however hear me out. There will come a time soon when drones will be a welcome sight in the right context...like looking for a shooting suspect or searching for live people/animals during an emergency. Sending the message that it's OK to shoot down a drone is the wrong approach to this problem. Some have suggested calling police would do no good, but as they become savvy to these issues they'll learn how to respond. Technical issues could be forthcoming too to identify and/or track drones. My suggestion is to not dig our heels in out of fear and miss out on the benefits that robotics can provide us - just my two cents.
That's just not true!
The IBM PC-AT keyboard, circa 1984, has control as a large key above shift and to the left of the 'A' key, in its proper place. Alt is below shift. There are no right-hand alt or control keys and caps-lock is off on the right side below shift where the right control key is now. There was a large gap between the spaceback and caps-lock, since there was no right alt or windows key.
The PC-XT keyboard, circa 1981, had the same layout of control-shift-alt in the proper order on the left. The caps-lock key was on the far upper-right corner, above the numeric keypad.
It wasn't until the 101 key model M that IBM messed up and placed the caps lock key in the incorrect location above shift and next to 'A'.
Is there really no one else here who remebers typing away on the original PC keyboard, with the control key in the proper location, the giant plus key, break on the scroll lock key and printscreen on the dedicated '*' key?
You don't need the R part of that anymore. Tap Windows, then start typing. This has been the case since 7 for sure, and probably Vista too (although I never really used Vista on my own machines).
FC Closer
Why can't you get a properly mapped keyboard nowadays? Doing some funny remap of cap-lock is not the same as having the CTRL key in the right place and the lock key between it and "A".
Old computers did it right (Unixen, Amiga, probably more). This really irks me.
OTOH, how often are you shouting at people behind your keyboard? Even then you only need to press it once, so it is working like intended I'd say Oh wait, I'm talking with people on the internet, the lock key gets used a bit I guess...
All of my keyboards have CAPSLOCK key cap popped off and taped to the side, in case I ever want to put it on again. Then a piece of electrical tape over the center post to keep crumbs out and done. Now when I go for 'A' I get just A every time. If I want CAPSLOCK I can press down directly on the post. It has reduced CAPSLOCK errors by 101%.
People not using Very Useful right mouse button... I'm mystified. Maybe they're just stupid.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Command Key, not Apple key.
(my husband's a big fan of the Kinesis keyboards, initially to cope with carpal tunnel)
You don't mess around with keyboards to fix that. Just ride a Harley to work. the heavy controls give you strong hands - and then you don't get carpal tunnel from light office work!
absolutely, I can hit control+esc on my own, thank you very much.
I think you will find a lot of Linux desktops have copied the actions from Windows for the Windows key (Linux calls it the Super key). Super-R for a run box, for instance.
Actually the key at that position was often called "Meta". This was true on early Linux X11 as well. For some reason it was changed to "Super" around 2000, thus breaking a lot of software that assumed it was Meta.
I once (many years ago) found myself in the same room with the manager responsible for Apple's peripherals, including keyboards. I asked (actually, begged) him to get rid of the stupid Caps Lock key. All he did was mumble something about "international standards" required for big corporate/government sales. So maybe the solution is to get corporations & governments to change their keyboard requirements. (Yeah, good luck with that...). In the mean time, every major OS has a tool or setting to make Caps lock control. Once you set that up, you don't even notice it any more.
It has been painfully easy to use the special characters in Windows for, like, ever. It is called the US English International keyboard layout. It works fine in every flavor of Linux that I have tried as well. CTRL + C and V copy and paste (respectively) in Windows. I do not know enough about Macs as I do not use them - so I avoid commenting on them. That might be a hint.
Man, as soon as I post AC I am an asshole. This is KGIII - I ran out of posts again. That arbitrary 50 post limit is silly. Anyhow, still gonna post this. General Principle and all that. It is obviously me. Nobody on the planet, except me, types gibberish like this.
right next to the calculator button. The 1 time a year you wish you had it you can hunt for it and push it. Maybe instead it could be a page down and with shift a page up button Rather than when navigating having to go way the hell off the home row to hit the tiny buttons.
Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:nocaps"
Someone who knows what carriage return means :)
Actually back in the 70s is when IBM did this iirc. But I get old, and yes, I used the original IBM PC.
A very informative comment :)
And vi rules! lol
WTF is an opened apple anyways? I call it the "gross apple" because you take 1 bite and set it down forever.
I still remap it to control. It's the only proper use of that key. If you have tools that use control key, it's extremely inconvenient to use the "standard" control key position, it just doesn't work for touch typists.
The capslock functionality itself is mostly useless too. You'd only really need it if you were using some language that only used upper case keywords, but even then it's cumbersome to keep turning it on and off.
I have been a Windows user for many years. I reprogrammed my keyboard so that the left side keys are all "control," the middle keys are all "alt" and the right side keys are all "delete."
I'm a (very poor) touch typist. If you start radically altering the keyboard, you will seriously P.O. every touch typist out there because our muscle memory won't work with your keyboard. That means that they will be much less likely to buy your keyboard. By extension, if your keyboard happens to be attached to a laptop, they will be much less likely to buy your laptop. Maybe non-touch typists will be more likely to buy your wares and offset the loss of the touch typists. But maybe not - what if they dislike your changes? Bottom line: there's probably no great business advantage to changing the keyboard but there is a significant business risk, so ain't gonna happen.
If you have a good idea for a better keyboard, start a kickstarter campaign and build/market it yourself. You'll make a huge pile of money. Or not.
linquendum tondere
I rarely use it on Windows 8. It's a stupid key. I don't use the feature to find program by name, it's too weird for me. If a program isn't pinned or on an icon, it's just not going to have a name I know by heart (ie, I'd probably type Word instead of Microsoft Word). For explorer it's pinned there and easy to use (and right click to get recent entries is more convenient than just getting explorer).
When I do use the windows key, it's to pop up (ugh) metro then click "all programs" to get a bizarrely organized start menu where I can browse for stuff I don't know the name of or to see what's there (things install with readme files or extra utilities that you'd never see if you didn't have a start menu or some other way to browse through it all).
Windows 10 now has a real start menu again, so even they recognize the folly of removing it even if their fanboys won't.
Alt key is same as meta most of the time. For alternate characters you use AltGr, even though it's not on US keyboards.
I have a macbook pro, but never open it. It's not a laptop for me, but a very thin desktop. So I use the mouse and keyboard, much more sensible (after you swap off Apple's idiotic idea of reversing the scroll direction to match phones).
It's easier to type acronyms, and case-sensitive passwords that are generated for you and you need to type once before changing, with a caps lock key.
the escape key - between esc and f1....
so it would be ESC, WIN, CAPS, F1
that would be ideal imo.
Because not everyone is a developer?
Accounts payable / data entry people most definitely use it. However, logically, of course the amount of times they press it is small - it *should* be small numbers of times they press it. That's the whole point of the capslock - you only need to press it occasionally to change your case.
So a data entry person may push it once - enter 2000 characters into a system that all need to be in upper case (and this is ludicrously common in various ERP or accounting systems), then push it again. For that person, capslock was invaluable - but for some half thought out metrics gathering muppets, they see capslock as hardly being used. I can't believe someone even needs to point this out...
You're both right in a way. The 3278s did have a cap lock next to the A key. That was because the 3278s replaced typewriters in the corporate environment. The original PC/XT/AT systems were not targeted at the corporate environment, they were targeted at the SOHO market. Those keyboards did not have the caps lock next to the A key. The 3270PC was used as a replacement for 3278, and it had the caps lock next to the A. This was the first IBM PC targeted for corporate. After that most of their PCS were corporate use, and they retained that layout.
... you insensitive clod! I have to press the CTRL key when I click, to get a menu!
Can't say I use caps lock for anything but fouling up passwords, though.
I type really fast however I never learned the normal way of typing and I use the caps lock key instead of the shift key. My hands move all around the keyboard so to have to hold a shift key down is too much work so I simply tap caps lock, type the capital letter and tap caps lock again to turn it off.
If the caps lock key ever went away I think I'd quit my programming job, sell my home computer and go live in the woods.
You can still buy keyboards with a DIP switch to swap the CTRL and Caps Lock keys.
That sounds expensive and unnecessary. It's pretty simple to remap (or swap) the keys with software, even Windows will let you do it, albeit with a registry change. I typically just remap caps to control. Can't say that I've missed caps lock, it isn't that hard to hold down shift and type. The only problem is being used to having a control key instead of caps is using computers where it isn't remapped. I'm forever turning on caps lock when I have to use other peoples computers. Grrr
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
I would say F6, F9, F11, Pause, SysRq, PrintScrn, are more useless than caps lock
IMHO, the IBM PC-AT keyboard was the best there ever was on a PC (or compatible.) It took me quite a long time to retrain myself when they moved that beautiful from that single large Ctrl key in the right place to two small keys in the wrong place. Worse, they put the Caps Lock in that prominent spot, leading to it getting hit a lot by accident - which I still do to this day: I think I hit it more often by accident than I do on purpose!
Society for the Banishment of the TAB Key.
I really, really, really do N.O.T. like the TAB key or finding source code where they've used TAB - I want to scream every time!
...Or even Ctrl-Alt-Del and Enter (chooses the first item, which is lock screen, at least on Win Xp Pro and 7 Enterprise, the only ones I have experience with).
AOL still in business
http://www.businessinsider.com...
For people who often don't have a mouse or just in general a reverse-Tab would be nice. Just the same function as Tab, but moves Right-Left instead of Left-Right.
If you type Word it will match up with Microsoft Word automatically, as it's a substring. Have you even used this feature? I think you're lying to us. Useless dickhead. Fuck off.
I've programmed mine to be another "Enter" key. Nice having them placed symetrically on the KB.
The "Menu" key is now CL.
jb
Am I the only one here who remaps his keyboard? Linux and Windows both have options to remap the keyboard, I generally switch and keys. For one laptop with / in a ugly place, I fixed up the keyboard. The best part is of course watching someone else sit at my keyboard.
Even worse were the keyboards that appeared for a brief time with 'sleep' and 'power off' keys.
http://linuxgazette.net/186/an...
Yes, there must be a Nigerian conspiracy to keep CapsLock.
http://bash.org/?835030
I still remap it to control. It's the only proper use of that key. ...
I tend to hit it when I go for the A-key so I've always simply remapped it to also be an A-key, or if I tend to hit both keys (depends on the keyboard) map it to do absolutely nothing.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
I preordered one from this kickstarter: http://shop.keyboard.io/
I have been a ergo keyboard nerd for years - looking for the next rethink.
Of course it has no caps lock. But you could get once, if you really really want to.
http://shop.keyboard.io/
This was a study of developers. Developers are not exactly typical users. Developers like things like vi and EMACS. And, in fact, developers can already buy keyboards with (for example) caps lock switched with control. (If they care, and are too lazy to remap their own keys.)
Do a broader study of general computer users, and then maybe we'll talk. (No real skin off my nose anyway, since if you design a keyboard layout Idon't like, I'll just remap it to be the way I do like. 'Cause I'm a developer.)
In Path of Exile it loops ^{Click} because I'm lazy.
Browsers and text editors it activates Ditto.
Photoshop it temporarily moves tool menus to my mouse.
Strokes Plus it activates my keys to LUA script.
Caps Lock is extremely useful I use it for everything except Caps Lock.
A lot of CAD drawings use all caps for annotation for fabrication. You need to follow the drawing style. You will need to pry the caps lock key from my cold dead fingers.
Then something is wrong with me, I guess.
I've had one where the sleep button was directly below the delete key. That keyboard lasted for about 3 days.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It's possible to remap the menu key to a different hardware key (such as Ins, Pause, or even the weird 'Calc' key I have on my Dell 17"), but it's harder to remap than most other keys, which you can do easily in Linux (In KDE it's in the advanced options in the keyboard settings).
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Rather, I consider it pretty easy. :-) Just hold down the ALT key, type in the four-digit code for the character you want, then release the ALT key and your character will show up
Is this really what Windows users consider easy? On a Mac, it depends on the keyboard layout, but for me it's alt-2. A cent symbol is alt-4 (dollar is shift-4). Entering a character with an accent is alt-something for the accent and then the letter that it goes on top of. For example, i-umlaut is option-u then i.
If memorising unicode character numbers is your idea of good HCI, then I really hope I never use a program that you've designed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Windows-D show the desktop
Windows-M minimise all windows
Windows-E Explorer
Windows-R Run
Windows on it's own Start Menu/Screen (CTRL-ESC does the same)
(and there are plethora more that I don't use - Google knows them)
So, yeah, when you have to run Windows, it's useful to know the Windows Key shortcuts. Cuts down on having to use the mouse. Lots of old Windows keyboard shortcuts still work too, and have done since at least Windows 3:
Alt-F4 close the currently running program
Alt-Space bring up the window menu. (a useful shortcut for a window that opened off-screen is Alt-Space M Left-arrow, then hold down the left mouse button and drag the window back onto the screen - Alt-Space brings up the menu, M for Move, and the left-arrow (or any arrow key) is important to do the initial move of the window before you can drag it with the mouse)
CTRL-SHIFT-ESC (since Windows 95) bring up the Task manager
Again, there are a plethora more that Google knows about, but these are the ones that I still use.
On a European keyboard, AltGr is used as a modifier. Using that, I can get (on my Irish layout) áéíóú and € easily - I don't need to remember any non-intuitive codes that I wouldn't be able to teach my mother...
I had a laptop once that didn't have a context menu key and I hated it. I had another that had the context menu key on the top row, and I hated it too.
Today, I rarely use the context menu key (certainly not consciously). I had to think for a few seconds to which key you were referring...
It amazing how usage patterns change over time without you actually noticing... hmmm....
Caps Lock is for the cases where you have to type more uppercase letters while still being able to type lower case letters: having caps lock reduces the amount of typing in this case. Shift is for the cases where you have to type more lowercase letters while still being able to type upper case letters: having shift reduces the amount of typing in this case.
So the question about "do we need caps lock at all?" requires that we have to think how common are those use cases where caps lock is beneficial. Some people use it for headlines when no other effects are possible. I've seen caps used in SQL commands and some companies even have "coding standard" to make the caps mandatory.
I have ordered a couple variants of these; haven't received either of them yet. But it sounds good in theory. And there are no IP issues: it's an open-source design, with open-source firmware, completely programmable so that each user can customize his own layout. (For the first time I'll have a keyboard I really "own".) The keyboard can still be made flat (although usually the two halves are positioned independently), so any laptop manufacturer could even start shipping with this kind of layout. I hope that will happen at some point.
The main points are that the two halves are rotated to a better angle to reduce strain, and also that the thumbs are able to operate several keys each, not just the spacebar.
What to do with capslock is such a minor issue compared to everything else that's wrong with QWERTY. This is why, despite being quite a fast typist, and not suffering particularly much wrist pain, I nevertheless feel that it's time to try something more efficient. I do have some shoulder pain sometimes, so figured maybe that's from having to hold my hands too close together in front of me. It's worse when I use a laptop too much, whereas at work I've been using an old Microsoft 4000 ergo keyboard for years.
Now if they would just ship... ;-)
An similar alternative is keyboard.io. From one side, I wish I'd waited for their crowdfunding campaign to get started, because it's gorgeous, and I love the wooden-case idea. From another side, I think theirs is going to be less customizable: every key has a different shape, so you can't have printed rearrangeable keycaps, e.g. if you want to try colemak you have to ignore the legends on the keys, or get keys without legends. And they are definitely not going to ship until the middle of next year, either.
I actually use Linux, OS X and occasionally Windows at work. (I work on Qt, so I need to be able to test bugs and features on every supported platform.) I use the same keyboard for all of them, on a KVM. It's not so hard to get capslock to be the control key on all of them. (On Linux though, that means remapping it on both the console and in X11 and Wayland globally, not just in some desktop environment's control panel.) But then after using OS X I have grown to like the idea of keeping control (as used on the terminal) separate from command (as used to copy and paste text and other such things, even in the terminal window). I'd like to find a way to make that consistent everywhere. I think I will find a way on Linux. But first I want to have an ergo keyboard with a real command key. (Thus the ergodox, with its customizable firmware.)
For now though, on a regular ergo keyboard, capslock is control, and control is also control on Linux and Windows, whereas on OS X I map capslock to control and control to command and the windows key to command, so that I can develop portable muscle-memory: I use the same key for control-C or command-C regardless of OS when I want to copy text, and the same capslock key for control-C to stop a running program, for example. And the windows key is closer to where the command key is on a MacBook Pro, so if I hit that one by accident it still works, whereas the windows key has no other use on OS X.
It IMO doesn't make as much sense to remap the windows key, because it has its own uses in various Linux desktops and window managers now. So, the more bucky keys, the better; it seems I actually use 5 of them now: control, command, alt, window and compose. Oh, and shift, of course. The window key is still the least useful though. Can't decide whether I prefer using window-mouse-drag or alt-mouse-drag for moving windows around. There is some inconsistency about that between openbox, awesome and weston.
I was using a model-M at home, with no Windows key, but my wife complained that she couldn't sleep, so that's the trouble with that. But then I had to try to use the two alt keys more effectively. The right one has to be compose if you need compose, whereas if you also have a menu key, you could use that for compose. I live in Norway now, and don't want to get used to Norwegian keyboards because they are too different (lots of odd and unnecessary changes), because I don't actually write much in the Norwegian language, and because I will never be able to switch completely due to having lots of old hardware. So I use compose for writing the 3 extra characters ø å and æ. I think it's an intuitive and extensible way to handle all the accented characters, and everyone should have a convenient way of typing them, even if they are only needed in rare cases.
After I switch to ergodox, I wonder if it's going to get really hard to use other keyboards though.
But surely it's time to re-visit the standard key layout? What keys would you eliminate or re-arrange?
i don't know about eliminating any keys, but I think a few additional keys might be a good idea:
* IABSDFI key: inserts the phrase "It ain't broke, so don't fix it".
* WRTW key: inserts the phrase "Why reinvent the wheel".
Shortcut keys are for power users and aren't really meant to be memorized directly.
The term "power user" is fairly meaningless. It typically references someone who knows all sorts of arcane stuff about an application or system. But it reinforces my point. If they need to know all this arcane stuff and the system is so clumsy they need shortcuts then the system needs to be designed better. I could be considered a power user of quite a number of applications but I still think shortcut keys are usually a clumsy workaround in most cases. There are exceptions but they are exceptions that prove the rule. I think keyboard shortcuts are a perfect example of the "if the only tool you have is a hammer everything is a nail" principle.
I prefer nice menus but I tend to go look up the shortcut keys or try to create a macro when I notice that I keep doing the same thing over and over again.
Exactly my point. I do the same thing (when possible) but I maintain that generally if I need to do that it very often means the interface needs some rework.
If you want to know how useful shortcut keys can be, try playing StarCraft 1 with someone who uses shortcut keys. They will beat you every time if you're just using the mouse.
It's not that they aren't useful or that they don't work. The problem I have with them is more of a design principle than a specific complaint. For example I happen to know that the shortcut to display the History in my browser is Ctrl+Shift+H. In my opinion if I'm using that so much that it needs a shortcut then it should be a more prominent part of the interface. As a general rule I think keyboard shortcuts should not be application specific any more than absolutely necessary. Cut/Copy/Paste are fine. Ctrl+Shift+A to open the Add-Ons in Firefox should either be user defined or simply not be given a shortcut or be made more prominent in the GUI.
The most useful Windows key shortcuts are the cursor keys for moving the current window around.
Nearly all architecture and related building design 'blueprints' still show text in all caps. My Cad designers spend 80% of their day with Caps Lock on. (And tend to shout a lot in IMs)
...but they admit it when they say Macs right out hence the reticence of the right mouse button, which, personally, I use ALL of the time on windows/linux/osx/what have you if it supports useful context menus.
CAPSLOCK: pretty obvious I'd think but it's really annoy that one guy that thinks ALL CAPS ARE THE WAY TO SEND MESSAGES ALL OF THE FSCKING TIME.
Everyone stops using Swiss German, or any other language besides English, and then we eliminate the dastardly CapsLock key that has been holding back progress for generations.
FREE AT LAST! FREE AT LAST!
I've long wanted a game where you are a wizard, and thieves steal your scrolls, unless you Scroll Lock.
That's fine until you get players using laptops. Imagine the following question in your game's support ticket system or in Arqade:
How do I lock my scrolls?
How do I keep thieves from stealing my scrolls? The game's manual says push the Scroll Lock key on the keyboard. But I'm playing on a Dell [model redacted] laptop whose keyboard doesn't have a Scroll Lock key.
[sparlock] [pc]
To be fair though, putting power and sleep buttons on the keyboard was a monumentally stupid idea. It's far too easy to accidentally hit them.
If they're placed in proper positions on a keyboard, how are they any easier to hit than the corresponding keys on a laptop? In any case, I have my keyboard's sleep key bound to "Ask what to do" (shutdown, restart, log out, or lock and suspend).
you can't tell your BiL he's an idiot.
Most insults can be reworded to be both more polite and more precise: "BiL could use some training in email best practices."
It could be magnetostriction along the power path between the wall and your SSD. It's the same source as the 60 Hz hum in a lot of non-motorized devices or the 15.7 kHz whine in a CRT SDTV.
As I do banking and credit payments (letter of credit) between countries, a long time ago the banking indiustry standarised on CAPITALS to avoid problems, and enable secure teletext tranactions. These same conventions apply today. Without a caps lock, I could be unproductive for long periods and I would not estimate the finacial problems for my customers or their suppliers or payroll payments of a mistype.
Regards Eion MacDonald
It's the first thing I do with every keyboard -- I pop off the Caps Lock key. No problems whatsoever.
Try it, you can always pop it back on if you suddenly need to TYPE IN ALL CAPS WITHOUT USING YOUR PINKIE FINGER.
Many people, who type professionally, find it less tiring to hit the capslock key and then type a letter, rather than having to hold down the shift key while typing a letter at the same time. Of course, it might depend on keyboard layout.
However, it is very bad to assume a small statistical usage means something is not needed. Like a seat belt, it might not be used very often, but if you need it and don't have it you could be in big trouble.
It is likely that no one, with any brains, would buy a keyboard with no capslock! 8-)
Hmm, never need Windows-D, the desktop is the only thing that ever shows. Minimize all windows is never needed (but sadly happens without my asking if my mouse drifts over to the hot corner). Explorer is less useful than right clicking on the pinned Explorer icon on the task bar and choosing the recently used location. Windows-R I have used a few times, but I often just create my own shortcut for the 3 things I have ever used that for (cmd, calc, and regedit).
So I could pry off that Windows key and never miss it, it can even fit into the same coffin as that pointless menu key.
By "context menu key", do you mean right-click? I'm assuming the mention of Right-click is either a mistake, or skewed by an inordinate amount of Mac users with their single button philosophy. I don't see how you are doing anything productively (with a mouse) if you aren't using right-click. If you aren't using a mouse at all, like for command line work or vi/vim, that's fine.
I switched to Colemak about a year ago. It's much better than QWERTY. And in the standard Colemak setup, Caps Lock is replaced with another Backspace key. That's useful.
No one ever said being a Heretic was easy.
Let us meet again in "Less Interesting Times"
yeah i guess the right mouse key wouldn't be popular with mac users but might be different among ibmers.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Just curious, what OS are you using? On both Windows and Linux, it's a pretty handy key.
when you're in a case-sensitive OS, it's a help alright.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Just curious, what OS are you using? On both Windows and Linux, it's a pretty handy key.
when you're in a case-sensitive OS, it's a help alright.
that was supposed to be the capslock, not the microsoft key. the microsoft key does things in linux??
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Consider the following cases:
1) You want to hot-swap your keyboards and have the adjustment carry over between keyboards.
2) You want to switching between host terminals and virtual machines and have the adjustment carry over into the various VMs.
3) You want the adjustment to affect the BIOS as well.
4) Your keyboard is on a KVM switch and you want the change to affect multiple computers that may be running different OS's.
In the above cases, it would be handy to have a physical "bump in the cable" adapter.
That's just not true! The IBM PC-AT keyboard, circa 1984, has control as a large key above shift and to the left of the 'A' key, in its proper place. Alt is below shift. There are no right-hand alt or control keys and caps-lock is off on the right side below shift where the right control key is now. There was a large gap between the spaceback and caps-lock, since there was no right alt or windows key. The PC-XT keyboard, circa 1981, had the same layout of control-shift-alt in the proper order on the left. The caps-lock key was on the far upper-right corner, above the numeric keypad. It wasn't until the 101 key model M that IBM messed up and placed the caps lock key in the incorrect location above shift and next to 'A'. Is there really no one else here who remebers typing away on the original PC keyboard, with the control key in the proper location, the giant plus key, break on the scroll lock key and printscreen on the dedicated '*' key?
And the freeware you would install to swap the AT keys back to where they had been.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Well, sometimes when you're reading Schindler's list...
SO THAT I CAN DO THIS!
I pull the guts out of the caps-lock key on any keyboard I use exclusively. I type quickly and don't watch the screen, and it's very common that I'll find that I've hit caps-lock accidentally and have to re-type a whole line or more of text. It's way more inconvenient for me to have the caps-lock key than it is to do without it. I almost never use it (on purpose) anyway. It's no problem to hold down the SHIFT with a pinkie while I type with the remaining 9 digits.
"control as a large key above shift and to the left of the 'A' key, in its proper place" Amen, preach it, brother! That's where God intended it to be.
And on computers where I have permissions to do so, the CapsLock key acts like a Ctrl key. It's a RegEdit hack in Windows; I think there's a similar way to do it in Linux. On most computers the CapsLock LED "knows" I've made the change, but on some keyboards the LED seems to still think that key is CapsLock.
I put the Ctrl keys to use by remapping most of them to be cursor movement keys, so I don't have to take my fingers off the alphabetic part of the keyboard to move the cursor.
Ctrl-Esc doesn't work? I use that to get to the Start Menu in Win7, I would have assumed Ctrl-Esc would have a similar function in Win8 (which I have avoided ever using).
Meta-Hyper-Nonsense
Well I also rarely use print screen and numpad keys but when I buy new laptop their presences is one of the major factors in my decision.
The keys on the keyboard are there because they have useful purpose.
http://i.stack.imgur.com/sgzBP...
On a keyboard that follows the Windows 104 key layout, it is the key that activates the same menu that is activated by a right-click of the mouse. One of the ancestor posts mentioned the Apple key and OSX that corresponds to the Windows logo key, but I'm not familiar enough with Apple keyboards to comment on them.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
It does! I have an IBM Model M attached to my Windows 8 PC, which gave me a brief bit of trouble until I learned that I could use Ctrl-Esc instead.
It's not the most ergonomic key chord, but as an Emacs user, I don't care about that anyway!
Bah! no fair I want to post this all in caps in a lame attempt to be funny;
why hate the capslock, how else can angry people mash out long stupid replies to stupid askslashdot article without suffering a major injury to the extremity holding down the fecking shift key..
you insensitive clod!!!!!1111qqbbq!
Guess what, I couldn't, the error "Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING."
Damn you /. damn yooooou!!!
The reason I hated it back when it first came out was I had several DOS programs I still ran, and if I accidentally pressed that key it'd drop out of DOS mode and into Windows and I'd lose all my work. I could have rebooted to launch that app, sure, but rebooting too a little longer back then than now. I just removed the key and I could feel when I was making the mistake easier... problem solved.
(sorry for the anon been so long I forgot my password)
Before killing Caps Lock remove that ridiculous Windows key that constantly gets in the way!
Nobody really needs to enter control characters anymore and for alternate characters we have already got the Alt Gr keys and the dead keys. (€ = Alt Gr + 5 and ó = ' and then o. Having used both Windows and the Mac, I can say there's no difference at all in the ease of entry of ‘special’ characters.)
So it's just good sense to make Ctrl and Alt do something that's actually useful, and their current functions in Windows are so useful that if you were to give Ctrl and Alt their former, useless functions back, you'd be obliged to add two extra keys to the keyboard.
Please think before you post. (And be a bit more practical, and check your facts first. But first and foremost, THINK.)
Nobody really needs to enter control characters anymore
Except those of us who use a terminal, who find control-C and control-Z (and, on FreeBSD, control-T) indispensable.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I stand corrected. Went back to look at the pictures.
How could I forget about that original 5150 keyboard? I did a bunch of custom application development to make use of those F1-F10 keys on the left.
In corporate environments in 1984, PCs were just starting to replace 3270-family terminals by equipping them with the adapter boards to connect the co-ax cable. The caps lock key placement *and* the move of the function keys to the top made the keyboard look a lot more like the 3178 terminal keyboards, introduced in 1983, with same plastic and feel as the PC keyboards. 3178s were the replacement for the 3278. The 3278s that had those glorious, indestructible keyboards with keycaps that felt like they were made of porcelain. The original Apple II had the same quality feel to the keycaps.
It does, in Gnome at least (not used KDE in donkey's years, other environments YMMV). https://wiki.gnome.org/Gnome3C... This obviously assumes you use a bog-standard keyboard, but you need to make a real effort these days to get one without a Windows key.
This is where the serious fun begins.
I don't know how it works on a Mac, but entering alternate characters is still easy with Windows, even 8.1. (I haven't tried it on 10.) Rather, I consider it pretty easy. :-) Just hold down the ALT key, type in the four-digit code for the character you want, then release the ALT key and your character will show up. A Euro sign is ALT+0128, for example.
On OS X, you hit Shift-Option-2. Option-3 gives a pound symbol, Option-4 cents.
You still have to get to know some of the shift-option combinations, but that's WAY easier than having to know all of the character codes for whatever you want to type. Less keystrokes too. Accented characters are somewhat easier, in that you can type the accent, and then the character you want to accent (so if you want a circumflex over a character you type Option-i, followed by the character to accent). Again, it's easier to remember one two-key stroke to get the accent you want, followed by typing the letter you need accented than remembering half a dozen four-digit numeric codes. OS X does this way better than Windows.
Yaz
Yes. Caps Lock is useless to me. One of these days I will install a utility to disable it.
Other keys:
I use : about ten times for every ; I use. Why aren't they in the opposite order.
In the old typing days. the . and , keys were often doubled, i.e. shift . was . and shift , was , It was actually faster for me that way. I don't use < and > enough to have them on that part of the keyboard. Ironically, on /. you have to type four characters to make those things appear.
While we are moving > and < can we move [ and ] and { and }. I actually use ( and ). If they were down on the [ and ] keys, it would save me some effort. I know that some programers use { and } a lot, but ordinary users don't.
Also, even in this internet age, I use ? which is part of ordinary English grammar, a lot more than /. Why not put / with \ and send | to some place where kind folks can give it a nice home? Then double the ? like the . and the ,
I would also like to say that I like and appreciate my right mouse button. I know it is anathema on Macs, but Windows makes good use of it.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.