Edited for clarity. Hand-printing, as in writing with a pen or pencil.
In other words, “I don’t use this and therefore it is of no utility because only I, and those like me, matter”. You should run for president. Narcissistic jackasses are in fashion.
Or the clutch pedal from a 1922 Citroen.
I thought you were closer to my age?
Anyhoos… my 11th grade English teacher wrote like that, instead of writing in cursive; because he claimed his penmanship was too illegible, especially for an educator.
I always thought that the purpose of the Caps Lock key was to lock you out of your computer by letting your otherwise correctly typed password not being recognized on account of being in the wrong case. PASSWORD PASSWORD PASSWORD WTF?!?!
I once accidentally hit the caps lock key before going away on vacation. It was on for 5 days straight and when I returned the caps fluid had been completely depleted. The thing was a mess and needed to be overhauled.
Only time I use caps lock is when entering alphanumeric codes… serial “numbers”, two factor auth, bargain codes, gift certificate codes, product codes, mac addresses, etc.
If the fields for entering these would simply automatically uppercase where lowercase is not allowed, all would be good with the universe. Alas, there is often not even any indication of whether lowercase is equivalent to uppercase, so you have to uppercase just in case. Fix this, get rid of the caps lock, and give me a back button.
On OSX: alt- –, alt-shift- —
…and in some places it will replace – with —, and … with …; not in this web input form for some unknown reason. That is one of the subtle reasons I hate Electron apps; things like that stop working in their input fields.
Ligatures definitely belong in software IMHO. Picking one out is a pain in the butt.
OSX will also fix up quotes if you tell it to in the Keyboard settings, I think this is the default.
I use Karabiner to remap my capslock to cmd-opt-shift. I only use this in Adobe Illustrator, but I use the heck out of it in Illustrator, as I have a lot of custom key shortcuts that I’ve accumulated over time. It’s pretty useful, I recommend trying it if there’s one program you spend a lot of time in and are getting to the point where you’re starting to assign three-modifier shortcuts.
If I actually need CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL then I can hit shift-capslock and it works the way it normally does. I think about 90% of the time I do this it is me accidentally fat-fingering capslock when hitting shift, though.
Thinking …um, 9 years old (born early '67)? So, 4th grade. Sounds about right. My lower-case lettering was always atrocious, but I was attending a magnet school for arts & creative thinking beginning that year (the alternative was to skip a grade), and the teachers didn’t give me any pushback on it.
Sun keyboards had the right idea.
(Back in the day when I worked a lot with SPARCstations, it was always a brief shock switching between a Sun and PC keyboard with the control key being in a different spot but I could usually adjust pretty quickly.)
My carpel tunnel handles that for me already.
It can be reassigned, ya know. Put it up in the function keys. I’ve often wanted a higher shift key on the left.
My keyboard not only has a Windows key, but it has a toggleable (with LED) Disable-Windows key, key. Maybe the solution to too many keys is more keys!
@ficuswhisperer The Sun keyboards are very polarizing. Either you like them or, like me, you find them to be some of the worst keyboards to ever curse this earth. Possibly it’s because I relate them to SPARC processors and SunOS.
I’ve been remapping Caps Lock key as Backspace for a few years now. I tried the CTRL remap for a while but never found it to be that useful. I guess I spend more time correcting mistakes than using CTRL-based key combinations.
I’m surprised that no one’s mentioned this: If most of one’s experience with typing is on touch screens - like on phones - then this may seem more natural than the traditional Shift-[letter] chord (pressing two keys at once) which as far as I know, isn’t generally an option on touch screens.
I haven’t noticed anyone doing this myself, so this is pure speculation on my part, but the comment that this is observed in young people mostly seems like a big clue.
Just moving to another country can get you 3 or maybe even 4 of those in one fell swoop
You should try it sometimes. In my experience most of the forms accept lowercase as if it is uppercase!
Yeah, I think it must have something to do with this, since it’s mostly young people that I think must’ve used computers before… although generally on touchscreens you don’t have to turn off the caps. But they might be hitting caps lock twice as a “workaround”. I suppose that since kids these days are using computers in their daily lives, but not having formal typing classes, that would explain the apparent disconnect.
Ha! I apologize for the non-accessible nature of my post.
It’s also a great practical joke, since there’s apparently no way to turn off that text-to-speech function once it gets started. If that was your intent, kudos, you bastard.
No No No No No.
At one point in the late '90s I was using XT keyboards, DEC VT Terminal keyboards, Sparc keyboards, 101 and 105 keyboards, and Natural keyboards on a daily basis.
One standard… please, for the love humanity… one standard keyboard layout. We’re mostly centered on the 105 keyboard standard; and Natural is just a split and rotate but all the keys are in the right places.
And don’t make me reach all the way up to the unloved PrtScn and Scr Lock key region to hit the *!#&@ gold key…