[atribecalledqst]

You can get into a similar state on MacOS by pressing a key multiple times in a row (option I think). It just quietly disables a large number of keys. I figured it out by accident one day because I assigned the key as my "push to talk" on Discord. That was a fun hour trying to figure out what had happened.

[miah_]

On MacOS if you remap your capslock to control there is a race condition on the login screen. If you use the control/capslock key to wake up your laptop and manage to time it right, you can enable capslock but not have a way to disable it (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?)).

[js2]

Funny, I just had a version of this happen to me this morning on iPad OS using a folio keyboard.

I had just upgraded to iPadOS 15 and the caps-lock-as-control setting reverted to the default. I went into settings and changed it back, but I did so with caps lock accidentially enabled.

This left the folio keyboard stuck in caps lock. I had to go back into settings, set caps lock back to caps lock, press the caps lock key to disable, then I could make it a control key. But trickily, the setting change didn't seem to take effect until I swiped out of the screen where you change that setting.

ANYWAY, I'M JUST GLAD I FIGURED IT OUT.

BTW, why does caps lock even still exist?

[Toutouxc]

> BTW, why does caps lock even still exist?

Dunno, but in my country we use a QWERTZ layout where you can't write the letters Ě, Š, Č, Ř, Ž, Ý Á, Í, É without caps lock, because with Shift those keys produce 2, 3, 4, ..., 0

So that's why I need it. :)

[rawbot]

Isn't this why Alt+Gr exist? I use US-International and you can do Alt+Gr + Shift for a different set of characters.

[hoseja]

Alternatively you can do ˇ + E etc...

[II2II]

> BTW, why does caps lock even still exist?

It was useful on some old machines that tended to prefer uppercase input. On typewriters, the shift lock key (which is slightly different) tended to be used when people wanted to add emphasis to a word or phrase.

As for modern computers, it is less useful. When one of the keyswitches on my keyboard failed, I replaced it with the keyswitch from the capslock since I figured it was the one key I was guaranteed to never use.

[klyrs]

Capslock exists to make typing in allcaps easy. I use it most when I'm in a C project with lots of macros. I use it about as often as I use ten-key -- just enough to justify its existence, not enough to find alternatives in every os/editor/browser/etc that I use.

[dotancohen]

I used to use Caps Lock when rewriting my sloppy SQL for production. But VIM makes it very easy to 'uppercase' a word with `gUiw`.

[klyrs]

Yep. That's one editor that I use, and only double the keystrokes.

[recursive]

Sometimes I use caps lock for its intended purpose. Probably not nearly enough to justify its existence as a physical key that takes up space, but at least a little.

[tokamak-teapot]

Lots of old documents with rules about writing ridiculously large parts of them in ALL CAPS. For no reason at all, that I can determine.

[Sanguinaire]

All-caps mode exists as a safe space for FORTRAN programmers.

[sbierwagen]

Notepad++ has a toolbar option that will uppercase all the currently selected text. Write a paragraph normally and then uppercase it with one click.

[tpxl]

Lots of tools have this. IntelliJ has it mapped to ctrl shift U by default I think.

[boogies]

In vim gU makes the selection/motion uppercase, gu makes it lowercase and ~ toggles each of its characters' cases.

[mangamadaiyan]

~

[Razengan]

why do capital letters even still exist? what’s the point really?

[lordnacho]

This is a rabbit hole that I followed as well. There's some good articles if you search for it.

Auto doesn't make total sense to me, but it seems originally the Romans had only the letters we know as capitals, and none of the extra characters like semicolon.

IIRC sometime in the middle ages lower case letters were added, but it's not clear to me why and how it ended up getting a bunch of different rules (eg German capitalises nouns but in English it's only proper nouns).

[ourcat]

Here's an interesting article on where and why they get commonly used in legal documents and contracts.

https://www.termsfeed.com/blog/all-caps-legal-agreements/

There are also theories out there about why our names appear in all-caps on government documents, relating to the concept of treating an individual as a 'corporation'.

[ljm]

Same deal if you remap the key in Windows using the PowerToys utility. Only, it'll happen whenever something pegs the CPU.

Never had the problem when using SharpKeys to rewrite the registry.

[chrismorgan]

Yeah, back when I was using Windows, I had RAlt mapped to Compose with WinCompose, and RAlt would get stuck occasionally when the system was under significant load, so I’d need to manually disable WinCompose, tap RAlt to clear its spurious down state, and then enable WinCompose again.

[Gaelan]

> (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?))

When I first started doing caps-lock-to-control, I mapped my physical control key to caps lock. Eventually, I stopped bothering and kept it as control.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Xorg has an option to toggle capslock by pressing both shift keys together, which seems like a nice solution.

[thesmok]

I'm using Caps Lock key to switch between input languages, but I can still use the caps lock mode by pressing Shift + Caps Lock. This is macOS built-in functionality.

[bscphil]

How would you remap the capslock key without using a hotkeys-like setup, such as Karabiner? I looked for a long time for a way to do that and couldn't figure it out.

[blacksmith_tb]

Sys Prefs > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... will let you switch it to a short list of alternatives.

[ksherlock]

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys

[axiosgunnar]

Perhaps hold shift to temporarily deactivate it then?

[ruined]

this happened to me a couple times before i switched to an external keyboard with qmk and just did the mapping in firmware

[treeman79]

Remote learning with a 1st grader showed me just how many ways a computer can get screwed up by random impresses.