Caps Lock is essentially useless.
Barring certain physical disabilities for which we already have Sticky Keys, it's easier and simpler to build a habit of holding Shift instead of tracking Caps Lock state.
Even designers have acknowledged this. Every decent password input will tell you when you have Caps Lock on, because you meant to have it off and you didn't check the key light.
You know, the key light, a privilege otherwise reserved for power state. Do you type ALL CAPS as often as you check if your laptop is charging? As often as you press Enter?1
Caps Lock is silly, but all meaningful keyboard decisions were made years ago and no one gets to change them now.2
But you can still tweak, and since Caps Lock is useless you can even do so without horribly breaking your muscle memory on other people's computers. Change a useless key to a useful one. Worst that'll happen is you type a few letters in the wrong case.
There's usually an explicit option buried somewhere in settings to rebind it, or on the less user friendly Linux distros several hacky configs. Ctrl is the most common swap because it's used in the most common shortcuts. If you do a lot of window movement you might prefer Super/Cmd/Windows, if you use a Vim-like editor Esc is a good option.
I set mine to Esc on tap, Ctrl on hold.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
Ah, the beautiful whooshing noise of the weekend speeding right on by.3
I'm tired and I'm happy. And I'm still out of time.
I was thinking about including specific instructions in this one, but if you made it here you should have the capacity to search for it yourself. Besides, I'm not really interested in doing so. I think the useful part is being told that this is a thing which can be changed, and is in fact quite easy to change.
I was surprised going back to some of my old favorite blogs, how much of writing is just prelude. Giving you the context and framing to accept a new idea and understand why it matters. It's often the least useful to reread because you already have the setup, but the most impactful because it gets you to think differently the first time.
It will forever be fun to point out absurdity though.
- Rew
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Home row key placement is an entirely different can of worms. Suffice to say the Dvorak people are correct, but I use too many computers which aren't mine for the switching cost to be remotely acceptable. ↩
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Technically Microsoft has successfully shown you can with the Copilot key, as long as you sacrifice a right modifier which no one used anyway. I'm not particularly attached to the right modifier keys, but once a blue moon something expects you to have them. ↩
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"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." - Douglas Adams ↩