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by randomsofr 3519 days ago
> I have been using Caps lock for escape for years

I didn't knew people were doing that :O, whats the benefit?, and how do you turn on caps?

4 comments

> I didn't knew people were doing that :O

I rebind mine to control.

> whats the benefit?

Control is an actually useful key, in Emacs specifically but also in OSX in general as all OSX controls have emacs-ish chords support (e.g. C-a C-e for start and end of line). Having Control on a large well-placed key is more convenient than have it on a small key in the corner, and I've literally no use for capslock.

> how do you turn on caps?

I don't think I've ever wanted that in the last 20 years or so, every single toggling of capslock has been by mistake. In fact one of my issues with windows is there still isn't a way to easily remap capslock, it takes 3 clicks in OSX (or ChromeOS), it takes installing third-party software or hand-rolling custom keyboard layouts on windows.

All the time I see people saying they never want caps lock. I develop in Java and it's convention to have constants be caps lock; other languages do something similar too. In that case what would be the solution without caps lock, typing each character holding shift? I think I'll try it to see how it goes but sounds weird to me.
> In that case what would be the solution without caps lock, typing each character holding shift?

Yes, what little you need to type before autocompletion kicks in anyway, and code is mostly not constants, writing constants is a much rarer case than chording Control in emacs, terminal or cocoa text control.

Vim user here... hence why it is mapped to Esc.
I remap caps lock to be the control key. I have never in my life used caps lock.
I have. All the time.

Mostly when doing finances with stock trading tickers. Tickers are almost always presented and handled in upper case. So when I'm doing work in the trading space, caps lock goes on and stays on.

S 1M IBM @MKT

Makes sense! I don't do anything with stocks.
I don't turn on caps. I usually only need it for a single letter, so the shift key does wonders.

I follow this setup[1], where caps lock can both function as ctrl and esc depending on how long you press/hold.

[1]: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/#cont...

I have the shift key for when I want to type caps. I don't think I have EVER used caps lock to type in all caps.