QMK supports as much as 4 different behaviors per key: - tap - hold - tap-hold - double tap
And you can also set keys to change the layer each with their own behavior for caps lock.
i always wondered why soft-BOL is set to such a difficult key to press (^) when it's such a useful movement.
Also, the right Alt and Ctrl are quick to go. But somehow there are always buttons for the windows and pop-up keys.
Some laptops manufacturers on my country also think it's a good idea to remove the forward slash and quotation mark. That's because it's the 105° key, and they can't reuse the US 104 keys standard they got from abroad, but well, somehow they think it's not a problem at all.
On the other direction, it's a good thing that desktop keyboards stopped including a "power my computer down" button where most keyboards have delete.
Some people can not understand how standards bring value.
That said, I acknowledge that you have your own prefered way, and that’s how it should be. As it also should be that these extra keys exist at least on bigger laptops, if not on ultraportables.
Remapped to <Compose>, the Caps-Lock key is essential for someone who writes in many different languages. Removing it would not make me very happy.
That being said: I'd love someone to build a modern, USB/Bluetooth-enabled variant of the old Space-Cadet keyboard [1]. Would pay good money for it, too.
Props to Apple, which in 2022 still provides an easy option to remap caps more or less straight in the keyboard configuration. And actually provides that even on iOS (which I was stoked to discover), though the remapping options are limited.
And boo to microsoft, the only significant OS where that’s not a native option, you need the powertoys and in my experience it’s quite unreliable: regularly capslock will revert and you have to go into the ‘toys and flip it off and on again.
I’ve never looked but I guess it’s some sort of registry setting which every update resets, without the ‘toys being aware of the info?
You press shift once and then the next key you press is capitalized (or a symbol or whatever).
And if you think "well, just keep shift pressed and use another finger to type what you would have typed with your pinky" it just means you're either not touch typing or doing it "wrong" :) There's a reason there are two shift keys on a keyboard, yet I rarely hear people complaining about this but plenty complain about the "useless" caps lock.
TL;DR: you can pry caps lock from my cold dead hands. I need it.
(ETA: maybe I should just remap double-shift to caps and be done with it, but that's just one more thing I have to learn and one more configuration I need to do on a new machine).
What surprises me are people who consider a certain key "useless" simply because they don't use it, so it should be removed/reassigned. And there's plenty of them in this thread who think that I'm doing it wrong by using the key for the exact job it was meant for.
Thinking of it, with modern messaging apps that support text formatting, it would be useful to have dedicated caps-lock-style keys for bold, italic, monospace, etc.
The value of capslock is that it provides an essentially blank key which can be remapped to something useful e.g. Ctrl, Esc, Meta, …
Exactly as the article mentions, caps lock is a nice to have, though rare, key. Removing or remapping it will complicate your typing in those scenarios for sure. if you find a better use for that space where it simplifies other more common scenarios, great. But just removing it would be idiotic.
They’re not, unless by “good keyboard” you mean “custom layout”. On all the keyboards I’ve ever known, the almost entirely useless capslock takes one of the more valuable places on the keyboard just left of the home row. It’s the modifier key which requires the least movement by far, yet with a native function which is almost entirely worthless.
I’d like to see your hypothetical keyboard where control (to say nothing of esc) is anywhere near as easy to reach, despite both being used significantly more than caps, and caps being trivially and fully dispensable with unless your days are spent writing SQL with all keywords in all caps.
> You could argue for mapping caps lock to Super or Hyper if you're an emacs user maybe
No, you really could not, unless you’re part of the minority which flies with fully custom keybindings. But even then control is such a central modifier of emacs that making it more accessible and require less contorsion tends to yield the highest bang for your buck.
You could always remap the old control to super or hyper instead of having two control keys I guess.
It's true that Esc is nowhere near as easy to reach, so if I used vim I'm sure I'd like to switch them (alt/meta is also easy to reach for me, so I never felt the need to use Esc for Meta in Emacs; and having two Alt keys anyway makes it better).
[0] https://img-prod-cms-rt-microsoft-com.akamaized.net/cms/api/... (using just this picture of the layout so this doesn't come off as some advertisement)
With multi-function keys (as supported by e.g. QMK-powered keyboards, or software like kmonad) allows adding multiple functions to a key.
e.g. "tap-hold": "tap CapsLock key sends 'Escape', hold CapsLock key sends 'Ctrl'" would be useful for someone who uses Vim and/or Emacs.
Taking 'tap-hold' a bit further, you can try putting the modifiers (which are only useful when held) under the home row keys: putting Alt, Gui, Ctrl, Shift underneath ASDF, (and reverse: Shift, Ctrl, Gui, Alt underneath JKL;). -- So called "home row modifiers".
The advantage is not needing to move the hand, and not needing to use the weaker pinky finger. Although, it can take some getting used to.
To be fair, on some keyboards, including the one I use, it's easy to reach both the right and left shift keys, so it's easy to alternate shift keys as needed to avoid using other fingers or moving your hand from the home row.
It's probably fairly obvious what I think about the taught-at-school touch typing method. It's a decent middle-of-the-road option that's intended to be easy to teach and to work for most people in most situations; that's all.
Why is the constant screaming at me? Why is the fact that it's a constant important enough to be encoded in the styling of the letters, but not important enough to be encoded in the name. Why isn't the IDE or the compiler keeping track of the constantness of the variable and reminding me to not do the wrong thing? If they can and are, why am I not trusting them? And if they can't, why am I writing in a language that doesn't even have JavaScript levels of a type system?
FWIW, "Caps Lock" is modal.
e.g. the Wikipedia page lists "Caps Lock" as a common example of mode errors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(user_interface)#Mode_err...
(No vim = not worrying about insert/normal mode; no capslock = no worrying about if tapping 'a' gives 'A' or 'a').
The Caps Lock key makes no sense in the context of a computer keyboard. Back in the days of typewriters when everything was a single monospaced font, typing in all caps was the only way to make something bold (there weren’t italics, bold, font sizes or different fonts). Having a convenient way to hold down the shift key was nice in this context. In the context of a computer keyboard that has multiple fonts, sizes and weights, it is a dumb key. Larry Tesler’s dictum “no modes” is immediately applicable. Steve Jobs tried to get rid of the caps lock key twice (once at Apple and once at Next). Google’s pixel books have replaced it with a search shortcut, which is not that useful but much better than having a key whose primary function is to mess up password entry and shout online without any extra effort for shouting. On a Mac keyboard there are a few common substitutions for caps lock that you can use. Any of these substitutions are preferable (I have it as Option for tab navigation but any of the other main hot keys make a better use of keyboard real estate).