Is Caps Lock Dead? 1206
An anonymous reader asks "Recently I have noticed that I haven't used caps lock other for any purpose other than hitting it by accident. Once upon a time, COBOL was written in all caps, and other languages like BASIC and Fortran were not case sensitive. Capitals were the way to go for writing code. Does the caps lock key serve any purpose any more, and if not, should it be removed, moved, or replaced?"
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I remapped my capslock into an extra control key months ago. I never type more than a couple of words in capitals, and can easily hold down the shift key.
Capslock is just a problem when you accidentally hit it when reading something you are keying in.
Not everyone is a programer (Score:5, Insightful)
Computer freeze check (Score:5, Insightful)
What a silly question (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the caps lock shouldn't be removed or replaced. It's handy to have a key that allows you to toggle lower to upper caps so you don't have to hold shift.
Pointless Ask Slashdot question!
Move the key (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, it is (Score:4, Insightful)
Replace it with a key labelled [help] (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OF COURSE IT SERVES A PURPOSE (Score:3, Insightful)
Swap caps lock and control (Score:5, Insightful)
You should have:
Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:swapcaps"
In the InputDevice section for your keyboard (in XF86Config, of course).
Voila'! Ctrl assumes its rightful place on the keyboard. Ergonomic implications are massive.
Equivalent hack is available for NT too. It's done via registry, but I can't be bothered to google for it right now.
scraping the bottom of the barrel! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Replace it with a key labelled [help] (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, in the over 20 years, I have never expected pressing this key would actually provide anything resembling help, but the key has been around.
Oh, and this gets an "Insightful"??? and scored 4???
Re:for actually using a computer (writing document (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Caps Lock? Who cares about Caps Lock? (Score:4, Insightful)
Think of the children (Score:2, Insightful)
While some of them can handle Shift + letter, many of them rely on Caps Lock to get a capital letter through, especially when they are just getting started.
Medical claims (Score:2, Insightful)
Ask the Japanese if they should get rid of hiragana since they have katakana, or get rid of kanji since they can simply spell phonetically. Uppercase characters are still important to data processing and the proper use of the English language.
Re:No! I use CapsLock as my "ESC" key (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Computer freeze check (Score:2, Insightful)
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU PEOPLE? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course I do. Don't you?
Either your code is full of single-letter names, or you don't do much programming. Holding down Shift while typing hurts my fingers if I do it too much. If I didn't have CAPS LOCK I'd be on workers' comp by now.
Re:Still use it sometimes.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Swap caps lock and control (Score:4, Insightful)
My "CapsLock" keys have the legend worn off of them, and one even has a groove from where my pinkie's fingernail hits it.
Re:Replace it with a key labelled [help] (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Swap caps lock and control (Score:3, Insightful)
The horrors of clicking caps-lock by mistake in VI...
suddenly hjkl do stuff like finding a man page for a command or removing a newline instead of moving around.........
Re:No! I use CapsLock as my "ESC" key (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What a silly question (Score:3, Insightful)
That is a software issue not a hardware one. Caps lock have nothing to do with >>99.9% of computing, and 99.9% of the time it is invoked accidentally, and it has negative effects on the users computing experience. The password entry should never be in all caps, neither should commandline interfaces, most editors (emacs, vi, etc) dont make sense when cap locks is enabled, and for some reason, all caps is difficult to read, and it LOOKS LIKE SOMEONE IS YELLING AT YOU!!!
I always disable it in windows, my mac, linux, etc. Its one of the 1st things I do when I get a new computer. Let the damn thing be emulated in software if its needed.
Caps lock in Military (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:For checking if system is dead (Score:3, Insightful)
I usually use NumLock for that...
Scroll lock is useful to stop the console scrolling (in linux VCs) when some program is spewing lots of data to stdout/err
It can be dangerous. I remember once pressing it accidentally while burning a CD. cdrecord locked trying to write its progress to the console, the CDwriter buffer emptied, and I lost the CD.
Honestly.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I use it all the time (Score:5, Insightful)
You say it doesn't help if you have a syntax highlighting editor; you can't count on having a syntax highlighted editor all the time.
While I think there are benefits to it, many interns that I've worked with seem paralyzed if they don't have syntax highlighting. A few are paralized if they don't have auto-complete. If the code REQUIRES syntax highlighting to be understandable, clearly you need to adopt a different style.
If you don't have SQL syntax highlighting, the more complex the SQL statement is the more it benefits from the all-cap keywords. That in itself is enough to justify (for me) it's use. Since I compose my SQL statements in my C++ interface code, I don't have SQL syntax highlighting; the C++ editor highlights them all as strings. Using caps really helps readability, especially when the SQL statements are complex and require several lines to compose.
Macro names (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
Pressing capslock puts the keyboard into upper case until the shift key is pressed. Then it should go off.
While I think this is a clever idea, it would nullify the point above. People who use capslock to type in long constants would have to press it after each underscore. As any decent programmer will tell you, ACONSTANTNAME is much worse than A_CONSTANT_NAME.
I personally touch-type and hold down the Shift key for long constants; I find it faster than synchronizing my Shift keypresses with my '_' keypresses.
Re:Happy Hacking (Score:1, Insightful)
I remapped the Caps Lock key to be a Left Control, and also put Escape left of the "1" key. The old Escape key closes the current window. Now I'm in business.
Keyboard update suggestions (Score:4, Insightful)
There are several keys that I think should be standard on all keyboards, not just to avoid having to use combinations, but mainly to avoid having a different combination in each program (ex., some programs use Ctrl+Z for undo, others use Alt+Backspace, etc.). Here's my list:
Most of these keys could simply emulate the most common shotcuts (ex., Help = F1, Cut = Ctrl+X, etc.), so they would automatically be compatible with most existing programs.
I doubt this will happen anytime soon, though, since Microsoft is pretty much the only company with the power to dictate a "standard", and the fact that the only new keys to appear in several years are the "winkeys" shows that their idea of a "useful" key is one that has their logo on it, even if it's only used about once a month (or, in my case, not even that).
Also, one thing I'd like to see is a mouse where, instead of a scroll wheel (or two wheels), there was a mini-trackball, that could be used to scroll both vertically and horizontally. I'm surprised no-one has come up with this yet (at least I've never seen one).
RMN
~~~
Re:I use it all the time (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No! I use CapsLock as my "ESC" key (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I use it all the time (Score:3, Insightful)
Because I so rarely use caps lock, it becomes a distraction to use. Its just so much more natural to hold shift and type "s-e-l-e-c-t" than pausing, looking down, and hitting caps lock. Yeah I know caps lock is right above shift, but I have trained myself to not accidently hit it, so I just can't naturally hit caps lock while typing .
I only caps lock when I know at the beginning of a large chunk of text that I will be using all caps.
I think this article does beg the question "When should we trade tradition for efficiency?"
Re:I use it all the time (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No! I use CapsLock as my "ESC" key (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No! I use CapsLock as my "ESC" key (Score:2, Insightful)
When I first got Linux up and running, it was using an American layout. To use backslash I had to press hash, and God knows where the hash key was mapped to, because the backslash key didn't do anything. I found myself copy and pasting from the Perl scripts I'd transported over from my parents' Windows box. Thankfully though, I only needed it in said Perl scripts. " was @ and @ was ".
Now, not only have I figured out how to change the layout, I've also managed to figure out how to stop num lock from being on when I log in. I've got nothing against the key, it's the LED that I hate.
Re:I use it all the time (Score:2, Insightful)
select *
from tblWhatever a
join tblYaddaYadda b
on a.ID = b.ID
where b.foo = 1
than: SELECT *
FROM tblWhatever W
JOIN tblYaddaYadda Y
ON W.ID = B.ID
WHERE Y.foo = 1
??
There are other potential problems in your SQL that unrelated to whether the reserved words are all caps or not. For instance: SELECT * can get some unexpected results. [First what table are you selecting from - not that important really, since you were just trying to show readibility.] However, even though the table of interest may have an altered structure you might not be seeing columns of interest if the stored procedure that contains this code was not refreshed after the structure change. You are using stored procedures I assume.
Another simple hint: use aliases that are more easily connected to the table name. Many of us use many more than two tables in our Joins.
For many reasons stay away from selecting everything, if you have no need for most columns. An easy way to bring your system down or locking others out if used in combination with temporary table on an older version of a backend server.
Just because you no longer have an interest in using all caps key, does not imply others do not. There are other more important problems.
Re:Yes (Score:2, Insightful)