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?

Comments

Because it toggles an LED!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's shift for some people

[spacemky]

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!

Re:It's shift for some people

[kbranch]

We actually recently hired a developer that does this. He asked for help when he couldn't figure out how to type capital letters on my keyboard (with caps lock remapped to control). Raised an alarm or two for me...

Re:It's shift for some people

[chispito]

I was surprised to learn that MANY people actually use the Caps Lock key as shift.

It's not just PEBKACs that do that. One of the world's fastest typists does this. http://seanwrona.com/typing.ph... (look under the "Typing Tips" section).

Re:The Microsoft key!!!! I've never used it...ever

[mwvdlee]

Just curious, what OS are you using?
On both Windows and Linux, it's a pretty handy key.

SubjectsSuck

[aardvarkjoe]

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.

Obligatory bash.org

[Junta]

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*.

Re:Caps Lock used to power a huge lever.

[SoftwareArtist]

I wish it still behaved as shift-lock: affecting all characters, not just letters. When I use caps lock, it's almost always because I'm typing an environment variable or #defined constant. And that means I'm going to be typing lots of _ characters. If caps lock behaved like shift lock, I wouldn't have to press shift for every one of them.

Sticking with a 1982 design

[Locke2005]

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...

For Linux: Remap CapsLock to Compose

[houghi]

Just remap your Caps-Lock key to the Compose key.
http://fsymbols.com/keyboard/l...

Re:Caps Lock used to power a huge lever.

[bdh]

www.autohotkey.com

For those interested in making the shift key act like a typewriter, I use this snippet. Double tap (within 500ms) either shift key, and it enables shift lock; a single tap disables it:

Shift::
      if A_PriorHotkey = Shift
      {
            if A_TimeSincePriorHotkey 500
            {
                  SetCapsLockState, on
                  return
            }
      }

      SetCapsLockState, on
      keywait, CapsLock
      SetCapsLockState, off
return