Today marked an inadvertent press of the Caps Lock key. Well, not just a press, but about the 30 millionth inadvertent press of the Caps Lock key. By me.
In 40 years of IT work, I never used the Caps Lock key on purpose, but about 30 million times by mistake. And each time, it was an irritant, something that sapped my productivity as I laboriously backed over the upper-case words to replace them with the proper, mixed-case variant. Of those 30 million times, by the time I erased the offending text, I estimate that about a fifth of the time I ended up forgetting what I was typing anyway and had to re-create not just the erroneous text, but the code or thought that I was trying to represent.
I have shared this grievance over the years with many people (admittedly, a small percentage of humanity), and almost to a person they agreed that the presence of the key created more of a nuisance than the benefit it created. So if I take one person’s loss of productivity and multiply it by all the people I knew who agreed its presence was a net loss, and multiply that by some horrendous number representing the actual number that those folks are a subset from, we are looking at a loss in productivity likely measured in the hundreds of years, along with enough irritation and stress to fund every funeral home in America for a few decades.
Now, before the hate and discontent starts to roll in, I already know that I can hack my computer registry to disable the key. I have been doing this stuff for long before some of my readers were born. But the hack is not supported by Microsoft and, like many useful hacks, is repeatedly undone by the endless streams of required Windows updates that come to our PCs.
How can this condition have persisted for so long? I am old enough to remember when everything input into a computer had to be in upper case, but I do not remember any keyboard having a key dedicated to the rare occurrence when something could actually be entered in mixed case. So it is not just a simple matter of the evolution of computing once having a lower-case-lock and now having a upper-case-lock instead. As well, the need for things to be in all upper case ceased to exist just after punched cards stopped being the programming medium of choice,
Maybe it was meant to slow typists down for some reason? Remember, the original QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to slow typists down so that the arms on the mechanical typewriters of the time (say, a hundred years ago) didn’t get tangled in each other during rapid typing. But tangling arms is a problem long-ago forgotten, so likely not it.
So the remaining conclusion is IHABDTW (it has always been done that way). Really, a fairly pathetic reason for just about anything. And we, dear fellow computer users, have allowed this transgression to continue, sapping our productivity and spirits, for far too long. A solution can be had.
A few posts ago (https://innoparticularorder.blog/2021/12/01/the-god-key/), I proposed the creation of an additional key on the keyboard called the God Key that, when pressed, would tell the computer to stop what it was doing and kindly listen to what I/we want, right now. I acknowledged that some hardware disruption would be occasioned by the addition of this blessed feature.
It turns out that a new key, and hardware disruption, is not actually needed; let’s just repurpose the Caps Lock key to be the God Key. PLEASE .
(Disclosure: no Caps Lock keys were used in preparing the previous line. Trust me.)
In no particular order 