Week 2 in the CAPSoff Campaign



CAPSoff.org has several banners, made by Guss77, based on paulgb's elegant CAPSoff logo.

The "What shall we do with the Caps Lock key" debate has raised many interesting suggestions, some of them polite enough to reprint here.

Mike h proposes a software solution:

Well the CapsLock as any other key on the keyboard can be remapped - as a temporary workaround until we get a solution.

Remapping is a popular fix but it does not work on all operating systems (I'm using a Dana with PalmOS that has no remapping functionality). And you have to go and remap every keyboard, every PC you work with. Yes, I've done this for years, but it seems wrong to have to continue 'fixing' our keyboards like this.

kimlik66 says:

yes i tried Dvorak and it's certainly better. However, i think the need
for a radically designed and much better keyboard is still out there :-)

A new keyboard design is an appealing idea, because the keyboard design for many non-English languages is pitiful. Maybe it's possible to design a keyboard that solves more than one legacy problem. Time for the
New Keyboard? Or should we try to fix one problem at a time?

Jonas points out that:

One new keyboard could be placed on the market once, a "key by key" roadmap with a new key removed/replaced will not be accepted by customers who had to buy a new keyboard every few years. What about a simple LED within the key for the beginning? I think about a kind of modular keyboard layout with extra space for language related characters and programmable keys.

Which is very sensible. The current mishmash of European language keyboards is a serious problem, since in every different language, letters and punctuation jump around randomly. Can we really solve this? Jonas, make us a proposal, if you like. Personally I'd love to see a single keyboard for all Latin alphabets, with clear access to accented characters. Why does my qwerty keyboard not let me type Spanish or Dutch? It should be possible to create a single European keyboard. Maybe the EU Commission would sponsor a study to create a single European Keyboard, since the different keyboard layouts are a barrier to internal movement of labour?

juve has a simpler and surprisingly popular solution:

I always rip it out of my keyboard.

It certainly makes a statement. I can't encourage the vandalism of public equipment - e.g. in libraries - but maybe it's time to start a "Rip it out!" campaign where people can remove their Caps Lock keys and send them to us. How many could we collect? Would anyone care?

huempu suggest:

A good idea would be to remove the lock on caps lock. The CAPS-lock key could be turned into an alternative shift.

Which would make three shifts. r03 had the idea of a second Enter key, which is intriguing. Typing would become a little like playing pinball. And two Enter keys would certainly be nicer for left-handers.

But Sudden Disruption speaks for many people when he says that:

I've been key swapping Capslock with Control ever since IBM screwed up the placement and I'd REALLY miss having a Control key there.. Actually, I move Capslock to F12 and keep two Control keys. But the one that gets all the use is where Capslock used to be.

Which I guess was what I wanted when is started CAPSoff. But Jonas and many like him have pointed out that the keyboard is really broken in other ways too. That's the problem with a grass-roots campaign - you never know where it's going to take you. Anyhow, so long as Caps Lock disappears from its current location, I'll be happy.

Steve puts it all together:

The caps-lock key is just a convenience for an inconvenient problem from the past.

Sure, everyone hates change, but without change we'd all still be living in caves and hunting mammoths with big sticks. When Apple stopped delivering computers with floppy drives people said they couldn't cope. Instead, those people discovered networks, email and USB sticks for moving data around. Now, no-one even considers the loss. The removal of the caps lock should be similar. If you really really REALLY can't cope, you'll still be able to get an "old-style" keyboard on the open market. Meanwhile, the masses will have moved on to the next step of keyboard evolution.

Exactly. Time for change. And it's up to us to make it happen.