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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
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.
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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.
Num pads on a laptop are ergonomics nightmares. Better to get BT numpad.
"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.
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?