Foo - whats the caps lock button for?

is it only to annoy people? or did aliens do it? the world may never know.....

Common complaint.

Read here and you will also find why it exists ;) or at least partially

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/09/21/471982.aspx

Also I can't figure out why people have a problem with it, I program and write normal documentation and don't think I have EVER hit it by accident.

In legal documents, most headings and captions have to be in all caps, so you can imagine what it would be like to have to type:

PLAINTIFF'S SWORN MOTION TO STRIKE AND MOTION IN OPPOSITION TO DEFENDANT'S UNTIMELY FILED NOTICE OF TAKING DEPOSITION DUCES TECUM OF THE REPRESENTATIVE OF THE PLAINTIFF CORPORATION WITH THE MOST KNOWLEDGE OF THE MATTERS SET FORTH IN PLAINTIFF'S COMPLAINT

without having a caps lock?

CapsLock is probably one of the most worthless keys unless you're accustomed to writing all your documents so they look like they came off a flash traffic teletype printer or you do lots of programming in Cobol, RPG II and FORTRAN-77. What irritates me more than anything else is that for some reason people have decided to place it in the more traditional position as the old VT100 layout's Ctrl key. I remap all my keyboards to swap CapsLock and L-Ctrl. On PeeCee keyboards which I personally own, have gone so far as to physically swap the keycaps and if they're of different shapes then I take a hacksaw to one of them to get it to fit. Luckily, my main desktop machine has a Sun Type5c "Unix Layout" keyboard hooked to it.

I use the Caps Lock key almost every day at work when typesetting tabs. It's much easier to hit Caps Lock and type them than it is to hold my pinky down on the left Shift key while typing, or remember to go back and change the property of each individual text block to Caps.

I use the caps lock 100% of the time when I'm at work. The administration forced computerization upon us, so we now have to type things that we had always handwritten. The caps lock is my little way of annoying them.

**** the caps lock button. It can't hold a torch to the insert key when it comes to annoying.

**** the caps lock button. It can't hold a torch to the insert key when it comes to annoying.
Amen! Only time I hit caps lock is when my fingers are out of position. Insert gets hit all the damn time! Didn't the backspace key used to be bigger?

I have a bad habit of accidentally hitting the capslock key while playing video games. Then I go check my email and it won't accept my password. Took me a little while to figure that out the first couple of times. Maybe if I try 'bind capslock kill' in counterstrike, that will teach me not to accidentally press it.

I say keep it.

Hitting caps all the time on accident means either the keyboard positioning needs adjusted, or the person needs to learn to use "home row".

What irritates me more than anything else is that for some reason people have decided to place it in the more traditional position as the old VT100 layout's Ctrl key. I remap all my keyboards to swap CapsLock and L-Ctrl. On PeeCee keyboards which I personally own, have gone so far as to physically swap the keycaps and if they're of different shapes then I take a hacksaw to one of them to get it to fit.

Wow.

Almost never use caps lock. Seldom hit insert button. Often times acceindetally hit the caps lock. They are both buttons that I'd like to seen be removed from their standard positions without bastardizing the rest of the keyboard. Sadly i don't think there is any way to move the caps lock key so I guess it just stays and we wait till mankind has decided we can have customized virtual keyboards that use functions and commands instead of letters.

They put it there to annoy the feeble minded.

Sadly i don't think there is any way to move the caps lock key so I guess it just stays

Sure there is... It's all a matter of modifying the scancode mapping.

Some keyboards allow you to do it directly on the keyboard itself by reprogramming the scancode processor either with DIP switches or some other hardware programming method.

Some systems allow you to do it from the hardware boot monitor/BIOS.

Some bootloaders allow you to do it too. From the grub bootloader...


setkey capslock control
setkey control capslock


Other bootloaders support a similar option.

For unix/X-Windows there are several options. Some OSes such as FreeBSD have a kernel compiletime option to swap the keys in the console driver and setting the remap option using pcvt. OpenBSD uses the wsconsctl utility. FreeBSD also allows you to simply remap it in the kernel config itself


Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:swapcaps"

For X using xmodmap...



! Apply in your ~/.xmodmap
!
! Swap Caps_Lock and Control_L
!
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
remove Control = Control_L
keysym Control_L = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L
add Lock = Caps_Lock
add Control = Control_L


Windows 2000/XP allows you to remap it in the registry...


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,3A,00,1D,00,1D,00,3A,00,00,00,00,00

CapsLock is probably one of the most worthless keys unless you're accustomed to writing all your documents so they look like they came off a flash traffic teletype printer or you do lots of programming in Cobol, RPG II and FORTRAN-77. What irritates me more than anything else is that for some reason people have decided to place it in the more traditional position as the old VT100 layout's Ctrl key. I remap all my keyboards to swap CapsLock and L-Ctrl. On PeeCee keyboards which I personally own, have gone so far as to physically swap the keycaps and if they're of different shapes then I take a hacksaw to one of them to get it to fit. Luckily, my main desktop machine has a Sun Type5c "Unix Layout" keyboard hooked to it.


YOU'RE SCARY.

YOU'RE SCARY.

You don't know the half of it. You're only just beginning to scratch the surface. ;)

i work as an a apprentice at a accounting firm so i use the number pad all day long.

Based off that i say that num lock is the stupidest button. if your typing in numbers and you accedently turn off num lock all kinds of weird and some times ireversable things happen to your documents.

iv had whole spreadsheets effed up becuase i hit some combination of numbers with the num lock off and it deletes stuff. then i cant for the life of me figure out how to undo it (and no the undo button doesnt help).

How about the scroll lock key? What is it supposed to do? I don't think I've ever used it except when I'm playing with the Caps/Num/Scroll Lock lights on the keyboard.

everyone seems to hate the insert key, I always hit this one ---> \\\\\\\\\\\\

How about the scroll lock key? What is it supposed to do? I don't think I've ever used it except when I'm playing with the Caps/Num/Scroll Lock lights on the keyboard.

Some OSes utilise the Scroll Lock. For instance, in console mode under some unix-like OSes, you can hit the Scroll Lock and then you'll be in console scrollback mode which will allow you to use the arrow keys to scroll up and down the screen buffer for lines that have scrolled past the display window. Under X-Windows, Scroll Lock can be used to temporarily disable update-scrolling in the window. This is useful if you're trying to read some scrollback of a continuously scrolling output but have update-scroll turned on by default meaning that as each line is outputted, the window will want to scroll down to the bottom. Having the ability to toggle on/off the update-scroll is useful to allow you to study a particular portion of the scrollback under heavy output. I also use a KVM and hitting the Scroll Lock twice in rapid succession causes an interrupt in the KVM switch to bring it to attention thus allowing me to flip between different hosts.

^^^ Yeah, what 'e said!

Why the CAPLOCK is there so we can SCREAM on online forums and chat!

I DON'T WANT TO GO TO BED MOMMY! :lol:

everyone seems to hate the insert key, I always hit this one ---> \\\\\\\\\\\\

On really complex text editors insert comes in handy. I have used it on ocassion

the insert key is the work of the devil. Writing reports for university there were times when i was editing stuff that i would hit the insert key and add a paragraph. Wouldnt look at the screen for a couple of minutes while typing and half a page worth of stuff would be gone. Good thing there was the undo button. But back in the day it was crap when you could only undo the last couple of actions...

WOW you guys are light years ahead of me......

I am still looking for the mysterious "any" key

WOW you guys are light years ahead of me......

I am still looking for the mysterious "any" key


:)

WOW you guys are light years ahead of me......

I am still looking for the mysterious "any" key

On my Sun Type5c-Unix keyboard, it's between the Help and F1.

http://www.neebu.net/~khuon/albums/misc/pict0003_003.sized.jpg

http://www.neebu.net/~khuon/albums/misc/pict0003_003.sized.jpg

Hmm, you seem to have a "props" key too. That must be handy.

This is just like anything else computer related, though. Having used a standard (read: non-Unix) keyboard my whole life, it's ridiculous for me to even consider that caps lock should be in a different location. It would never have occurred to me that L-Control would be anywhere else except for exactly opposite R-Control.

With that said, it's shocking to me that someone would put the effort into taking apart keyboards and remapping key codes just to make new keyboards into the old design, but whatever works for you...

i work as an a apprentice at a accounting firm so i use the number pad all day long.

Based off that i say that num lock is the stupidest button. if your typing in numbers and you accedently turn off num lock all kinds of weird and some times ireversable things happen to your documents.

iv had whole spreadsheets effed up becuase i hit some combination of numbers with the num lock off and it deletes stuff. then i cant for the life of me figure out how to undo it (and no the undo button doesnt help).
:roflmao:
And this is where I find the stereotype for people who have magical computer problems that plague them and are "unfixablle" yet the rest of the world doesn't have problems with. Undo has worked really well in every single spreadsheet I've worked in since the days of Windows 3.1 when they first started tinkering with the ideas. Actually I think even databases like SuperCalc had basic undo commands too.

Hmm, you seem to have a "props" key too. That must be handy.

This is just like anything else computer related, though. Having used a standard (read: non-Unix) keyboard my whole life, it's ridiculous for me to even consider that caps lock should be in a different location. It would never have occurred to me that L-Control would be anywhere else except for exactly opposite R-Control.

With that said, it's shocking to me that someone would put the effort into taking apart keyboards and remapping key codes just to make new keyboards into the old design, but whatever works for you...
wholy ****. That keyboard would **** me up quite badly.

Hmm, you seem to have a "props" key too. That must be handy.

The Props key maps to the OpenWindows or CDE properties dialog popup. To be honest, I actually don't use it that much as I prefer to handcode all my settings into their proper config files using a text editor rather than relying on the GUI.



This is just like anything else computer related, though. Having used a standard (read: non-Unix) keyboard my whole life, it's ridiculous for me to even consider that caps lock should be in a different location. It would never have occurred to me that L-Control would be anywhere else except for exactly opposite R-Control.

The thing is the original ANSI/VT100 keyboard layout which the first IBM-PC also adopted (PC-83) never had a R-Ctrl key. On the VT100, the Ctrl key sat to the left of the CapsLock key which was directly left of the A key.

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/vt100-keyboard-700.jpg

I actually sort of hated that layout because I disliked the placement of the CapsLock but the Ctrl was at least in a reasonable location. I liked the PC83 layout better because they moved the CapsLock out of the way. The Sun keyboards in Unix layout retains the placement of the Ctrl key.

Here's a PC83 layout.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/kb/layout/z_011261xt.jpg

It wasn't until the introduction of the PC101 layout (and its variants) that the industry started to adopt the placement of L-Ctrl and R-Ctrl in the bottom row.



With that said, it's shocking to me that someone would put the effort into taking apart keyboards and remapping key codes just to make new keyboards into the old design, but whatever works for you...

I only do that for keyboards I deem are "incorrect". I like the fact that my type5c-unix keyboard comes in the "correct" configuration for me.

Nothing wrong with reconfiguring keyboards. I use a Dvorak layout all the time on my own computers (with the keys still labeled in QWERTY configuration), but a standard QWERTY layout on shared computers. In either case, it takes me a few seconds to get my mind in the proper layout, but then I'm able to type perfectly fine either way. Slightly faster in Dvorak, but much faster than most people either way.

It's interesting how some applications have retained their function bindings based on older keyboard layouts. For instance, the placement of the F-keys of the PC83 dictated the binding of throttle and flap mappings in SubLogic's (before they were purchased by Microsoft) Flight Simulator because it "made sense". It's a mapping that I believe still exists today even though the function keys of the PC101+ have moved to a horizontal row above the number keys on top.

::extensive keyboard information::

This is very interesting.