About Adam Knight
Location
Austin, TX
Home page/site
http://www.hopelessgeek.com/
Author Biography
Adam Knight is one of the founders of Mac Geekery and is a geek at heart. Programmer by day, hacker by night, his daily life revolves around the Macintosh platform, which he has been a user and programmer for since the early days of System 7 when his LCII replaced his Apple //c.
In-between tech jobs, he’s managed to learn the basics of any web hacker: PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, *BSD, and the intricacies of ./configure —prefix=~/bombshelter/. Today, codepoet is concentrating on blogging again, writing some software for the Mac by himself (including Notae) and for his company (such as Photonic) and has a few other toys coming out soon. Bug him over AIM or email [link fixed].
Disabling a key that I do use, albeit infrequently, is just not practical. A far better solution is to have a notification for when Caps Lock has been inadvertantly activated.
I use John Woodward’s CAPS Warn: http://www.thewoodwards.us/sw/CAPSWarn/
If you use it at all, sure. I never do.
What I do instead is turn on Sticky Keys in Universal Access and then hit Shift five times to turn it on, then press Shift again and type until I’m done using it. It requires far more care to turn on and does the same thing, mostly.
I like the idea as I don’t use that key too often neither, but then, I AM SORRY TO WASTE that resource. I wish my keyboard had more shortcut/function keys. So, would there be a way to transform that key into a F13 or F17 ?
I suggest to use the same method to make it a Control key. Many Mac apps support Emacs navigation keys – Ctrl-a/Ctrl-e for start/end of line, Ctrl-b/Ctrl-f for left/right, Ctrl-p/Ctrl-n for up/down. Much faster for touch-typists than using the cursor keys.
Developers still have plenty of need for caps lock, what with all the annoying MACROS_NAMED_LIKE_THIS.
That SysPref doesn’t work in 10.3.9 and earlier.
My wife used to use Caps Lock to type ANY capital letters. The start of a sentence? Yep, she’d turn on Caps Lock for one letter. So.. I did what you said in this article (but a few weeks ago now) and she’s been forced to use Shift. She doesn’t like it, but you gotta be cruel to be kind, right?
THANK YOU! (these few words were my last use of Caps Lock).
Apple cares so much about usability – except in this case. They should remove the Caps Lock key and use the space for the better (e.g. a bigger Return key or just some free space). I hope they listen to guys like you.