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Thu, Sep 17, 2009

[Icon][Icon]Caps Lock

• Post categories: Omni, Rant, Technology, My Life

It's an annoying button that gets far too much prominence on the keyboard in relation to how much it gets used. When it should be off with the "Ins, Del, etc" buttons as an occasionally-useful but mostly-ignored button, it sits right in the prime space next to the 'A' key, where it gets triggered by accident all too often.

And when it's on by accident, everything you type is the wrong case and has to be re-written.

So here's a suggestion for OS\GUI creators everywhere: Howsabout you make it so that, when any text is highlighted and the Caps Lock key is pressed, the selected text gets its case inverted?

That way, when you type a whole line with the Caps Lock on, you just highlight it and press the Caps Lock key, and the problem is fixed. And when you need to invert cases for other reasons, as people occasionally do, you have this helpful little feature.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but I'd find the Caps Lock key much more useful to have if it was a universal case-switcher for already-written text as well as just for keyboard input.

5 comments

Josh
Comment from: Josh [Visitor] · http://quay.wordpress.com
I've never found a need for Caps Lock either... I just remap it to Ctrl. Originally this was for emacs, but you actually do quite a bit with Ctrl for Windows stuff (CTRL+C,CTRL+V,Firefox tab=CTRL+T). It's hard for me to even deal with a keyboard that doesn't have that remapping anymore ;)

17/09/09 @ 21:46
Dion Moult
Comment from: Dion Moult [Visitor] · http://thinkmoult.com/
Like Josh I chose to remap my caps key - but not to the Ctrl. Instead I map it as the key required for other commands in Ratpoison. I don't know how tiling WMs can ever get faster once I've done that.
17/09/09 @ 23:33
oneandoneis2
Comment from: oneandoneis2 [Member] · http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/
Someday, I'll buy something like the Optimus keyboard, so not only can you remap the keys, but you can change how it looks so it advertises to the world that it's not a damn Caps Lock key :o)

Not being an Emacs or Ratpoison user (Vi and FVWM FTW! ;o) I've not bothered to remap it so far.. making it a Ctrl key might be useful, but then I'd have to remap some other key to be a Caps Lock because sadly, I do need to use it from time to time..
20/09/09 @ 19:34
Mike
Comment from: Mike [Visitor]
If you are using gvim (graphical vim), you can just highlight the text and press "~" to have it inverted.
16/10/09 @ 15:10
Levi
Comment from: Levi [Visitor] Email
You don't even need gvim, use vim, press CTRL-V and there you have your fancy visual block highlighted! (One can then press ~ or d or whatever he wants to.)
04/01/10 @ 23:42

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