KILL THE CAPS LOCK
16 August 2006 | By Ian in Rants, Sites of Interest
CAPSoff has embarked on a crusade to eliminate the Caps Lock key from standard keyboards. I have used applications such as Toggler for Windows for years to automatically control the Caps Lock key, but the idea of eliminating it altogether seems fairly reasonable. It is true that it causes more headaches than it prevents for most people.
If not eliminated, I would strongly advocate popular operating systems adding an option to delay toggling the Caps Lock key on until it is held for a few seconds. Several applications already include a “smart caps” feature that automatically turns off caps if you begin a sentence holding down the shift key and then type several more letters without it, as you would if you didn’t mean to turn on caps. Enabling these features system wide would prevent the most common problem of inadvertent caps typing.
Another solution would be to remove the Caps Lock key and make a new convention of pressing both shift keys at the same time to trigger lock-shift. It may seem obscure, but Ctrl+Alt+Del was also obscure to you at one time as well.