INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY


As you can plainly see, we’re embracing International Caps Lock Day with full gusto. Go ahead, try it out in the comments. Caps lock is the cruise control for cool. Surprisingly, there are quite a few full time haters of the key running campaigns: CAPSoff and anticAPSLOCK actually united to form CAPSoff.org to further development of a caps lock free keyboard.

Once you’re tired of yelling at people online (like that’ll happen), you might attempt to do something useful with the key. In OSX, you can remap the caps lock key in System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Modifier Keys. You can make it an extra Command, Control, Option, or select No Action. If you want to map it to another key entirely, try a program like fKeys. You could map it to Esc to make Vim—THE BEST TEXT EDITOR EVER—easy to use. In Windows, try this handy guide from TechRepublic for remapping your keys.

If ease of use is not your goal, you could always make a random caps locker hardware dongle.

[photo: catcubed]

46 thoughts on “INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY

  1. ENJOY YOUR SHAMELESS PLUG MUCH?

    I AGREE THE AUTO-CONVERSION OF COMMENTS TO LOWERCASE MAKES THIS FAR LESS FUN THAN IT COULD BE.

    CAPSLOCK SHOULD BE RESERVED FOR UNFORTUNATELY LONG #DEFINES.

  2. “As you can plainly see, we’re embracing International Caps Lock Day with full gusto. Go ahead, try it out in the comments. ”

    If you were joking, the joke was lost. I really thought you had enabled caps lock for one post or something, but nope. Fail.
    -Taylor

  3. All caps for a day…this is going to hurt.

    I just had a look at that diy site and 50% of everything on there is from here so you fail…badly.

    looks like a new version of wordpress is on the way eliot.

  4. Waaay back when I wrote a DOS TSR that, when installed, would toggle the caps lock state of the keyboard at every hardware timer tick (about 17 times a second). I would of course never ever have made this a virus but I did surreptitiously install it on the computers of a few people who deserved a little chaos. It was a maddening little thing if you couldn’t figure out how to stop it.

  5. “and every year we have sex with our caps locks!!!!!! ” wow. i’m not sure what to say. so instead I’ll thank localroger for saying “tsr” and reminding me of my favorite high-school computer lab pranks.

  6. I can read all uppercase or lowercase blocks of text ok, though I don’t much like all uppercase, but strangely I find blocks of text where the first letter of each word is in uppercase difficult to read.

  7. Listen up whiners and complainers. I have brought caps back to Hackaday! See, had uses a css with the text-transform property set, giving everything a lowercase. What you do is (if your using a browser which lets you use a user style sheet) add

    * { text-transform: none !important;}
    and
    body { text-transform: none !important;}

    To the user style sheet. Presto, no more forced lowercase on everything. Alternatively, you can put “uppercase” instead of “none” for forced caps, or “capitalized” to force everything word to have the first letter capitalized. Note, this will effect everything, not just hackaday.com, so “none” will completely render every css without the other text-transform options.

  8. I just don’t get this campaign. Maybe because CapsLock is actually useful when you want to type uppercase letters with accents, as you might do in a lot of languages, except English, of course.

  9. CAPS-LOCK DAY IS FUN !
    BUT, NEXT WE’LL HAVE THE NUM-LOCK DAY AND SCROLL-LOCK DAY AND ANY KEY DAY.

  10. i have no problem with caps lock, sure i hardly use capital letters at all, but the really ugly keys are the windows one, this is why i use a very old keyboard from olivetti, this beauty has nothing such a nonsense buttons…

  11. millions of japanese people (and anyone who works with the japanese language) absolutely need the caps lock key. it serves as one of the mode toggles between roman, hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Im sure this is true of chinese and russian, as well as a host of other alphabets.
    There are two additional keys on the japanese keyboard to facilitate mode toggling as well. For ‘english’ keyboards, the caps lock mode switch is absolutely essentiall, as those other two keys have to be replicated using the mouse and the langauge bar.

    A nice feature of the japanese standard keyboard is that internet related keys are not shifted keys… they stand on their own, such as @ and :

  12. hmm.. you’d be right.. It looks like mine has the three as well. (the forth you mention is Function + 1 key on my khojinsha). I hadnt counted them on the various boards I have used. At least two if not all three of those down below are dedicated keys. the one up top may or may not be a dedicated key depending on the board.. I dont know.
    So. yeah. point is.. eliminating the capslock key alltogether is a rather silly idea.

  13. I’ve been typing in colemak for about a year now and i have to say it’s far superior to either dvorak or qwerty, and not just because the keys are in the right spots. No capslock and two backspace keys has a lot to do with it.

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