At Slate, Christopher Beam writes about the Caps Lock key, gone from the new Google laptop. Pace Beam, I don’t think the absence of Caps Lock is a step toward the disappearance of capital letters — like, say, the G in Google. Caps Lock is just in an awkward spot, too easily hit when one goes for Shift or Tab. Replacing Caps Lock with a Search key, as Google has, seems to me to introduce a worse annoyance.
[To disable Caps Lock on a Mac: go to Keyboard & Mouse in System Preferences, click on Modifier Keys, and choose No Action for the Caps Lock key.]
Friday, December 17, 2010
Google and Caps Lock
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comments: 2
Hitting Caps Lock accidently is annoying but I think that assigning another function to that key is shifting the problem, not solving it - I'd rather hit Caps Lock unintentionally instead of being thrown out of my work by a search page. On my Model M keyboard, built April 1987, the Caps Lock key is disabled so I now have a Zen key. In a world full of buttons and switches that mostly have more than one function a key that does nothing except occupying valuable space is sheer extravagance ;-)
I have had my Caps Lock key remapped for quite a while now and I have missed it probably once in the past two years. I have used the key, transmogrified into another CTRL key, many times per day, happily.
The only problem is when I switch back to a computer where the Caps Lock is not remapped, and I start composing whole sections in capital letters.
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