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Comment by p_eter_p | Hacker News Reader

There is a special place in hell reserved for the designer who swapped the function and control key placement on that keyboard. Thankfully you can change it in the bios.

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You say swapped, I say its the correct placement. I use control much more frequently than fn, and its easier to reach it with my pinky on the thinkpad keyboard.

Me too, that's why I have Control and Caps-Lock swapped.

Caps lock master race, reporting in. It's amazing how well-suited Caps lock is to act as the Ctrl key. Go through the pain of remapping for a day, feel great using your new, anatomic Ctrl for the rest of your life.

Seriously, do it now. In two days, you'll thank me.

Inspired by the Search key in ChromeOS, I've been mapping Caps-A to "Quick Open File…" and Caps-S to "Command Palette…" in Sublime for years. It's wickedly convenient.

As a heavy emacs user, this was one of the best things I ever did. I used to think the term "emacs pinky" was a joke, but it is really not.

And anyway, I cannot remember needing CapsLock even a single time, but I do remember hitting it by accident many times, so I do not really miss it.

It's a start, but I'm much happier having moved it to under my thumb.

A variation: Caps-Lock swapped with Backspace. This has worked well for me.

That'd be rubout on a Symbolics keyboard isn't it?

Aye :)

My favorite: map caps-lock to left mouse click.

I agree with you that it's easier to reach, but it's harder to find the ctrl key by feel. That being said, I haven't swapped the keys in my bios, and I've gotten used to this layout...

Don't use your pinky, use the meat of your hand to press the control key.

That way I also press Shift, Fn and the Windows key, while holing my hand in a very unergonomic position.

This is how I also use the control key, using the bone in my hand right where the pinky attaches to the hand. When ctrl is in the very corner, it's easy to press. When it's to the right of the fn (like on the apple keyboard I am currently using), it is significantly harder.

How is that physically possible?

I had a temporary job transcribing videotaped meetings to text and I used ctrl a lot for controlling the video. That fn placement almost killed my left hand, would have been perfectly fine if they were switched but that alone greatly limited my freedom of movement as I really wanted to borrow a sane keyboard wherever I went.

edit: I guess it must depend on the size of the keyboard. On the x-series it was unforgivable.

swap ALT and CTRL, then map CAPS to ALT. Then you can hit "CTRL" with your left thumb.

I tried pressing Alt with my left thumb, and it felt like playing Twister using my hand.

Hats off to your dutiful fingers.

Long live the Capslock-as-control-key master race. :)

emacs user! another to be expunged.

all hail <esc> as caps lock!

    for on that day,
        all shall be in normal mode,
      on the day of text
        one will `export EDITOR=/usr/bin/vim`

-- from the book of vim 2:12

The best way to deal with Caps Lock is to make it a Control Key when used as a modifier (held down when another key is pressed), but Escape when typed by itself. There's a program for GNU/Linux called xscape that does exactly that.

That sounds great! I am trying it right now...

FYI it's here: https://github.com/alols/xcape

You should be able to do that with only XKB, but Xorg XKB seems somewhat buggy and the documentation is scattered, so you'd have a bit of work ahead of you.

I use vim and have caps lock bound to control. I use Ctrl-[ to switch to normal mode and ctrl is so much more useful outside of just vim.

I remapped jj to esc, for what it's worth, so I don't have to reach for anything. I'm one of the Capslock-as-ctrl people as well, and a vim user.

me too

I have done no remapping but Ctrl-[ is very good for my wrists.

Spacemacs! Spacemacs! Spacemacs!

I'm actually a Vimmer :)

Get over yourself! ed(1) is the TRUE text editor.

I have both a ThinkPad and a MacBook Pro and MacBooks are also doing it.

I prefer to override Caps Lock to be another Ctrl and I can't remember the last time I felt the need to use the normal left-Ctrl. The best part is that Caps Lock is here to stay because many users like to write ALL CAPS.

The Lenovo X1 Carbon actually did remove caps, instead putting home/end there. I believe it also removed the F keys, instead adding an "adaptive" touch strip. They undid it in the latest version. I wouldn't consider anything safe from the terrible designers at Lenovo.

It is fine that they wanna experiment. I just wish they'd sell a premium option with the old style, good, keyboards.

At least they gave us the physical trackpoint buttons back.

I don't write in ALL CAPS, but I do have to type code where some constant like SERVER_RETRY_TIMEOUT will be in all caps. So I do use my caps lock key a lot.

I don't do this, for some reason. And it makes some sense, because in the case of underscored names on US layout at least, I'm going to be doing shifting inside it anyway, and I'll have to time it right or I'll get uncapitalized letters on either side of the underscores. So I just hold shift the whole way through, switching which hand is shifting if needed.

Maybe I'd use a "shift lock" that's cancelable by holding shift, but since I've recently mapped Caps Lock to Esc and want to keep that, I guess I'd have to make the Esc key into shift lock. Esc is kind of distant, but maybe worth it to avoid RSI typing 10+ character-long sequences holding shift the whole time...

Isn't there a to caps functionality for a lot of ides and editors?

And in shells. Alt-u uppercases the word following the cursor with vanilla bash+readline everywhere I've tried. So the sequence would be to type "server_retry_timeout", Ctrl-a to jump to beginning of line, Alt-u-u-u to uppercase the next three words.

Ummmm... yeah, I think I stick to using caps lock.

Unless you work in a corp that locks down BIOS.

Also note the size and placement of the delete key. It just seems a little bit bigger and easier to reach. And I'm sure this is due to corporate use of email, where pressing delete quickly speeds up the day no end.

I was confused as to why you found that unusual until I realized that this is actually only normal for those who use an Apple keyboard.

The mac has the command-key though, making the ctrl-key less important.

Unfortunately, you can't switch them in every bios. I just ditched my SL510, but had to suffer with it for years. I tried everything to fix it, but to no avail. If I recall, it's not even a key that keyboard binding/remapping programs recognize, so I couldn't even remap it with 3rd party software. Ruined an otherwise perfect laptop keyboard.

it is a weird layout, but once you get used to it it is really really efficient. I used a thinkpad for about 5-7 years and would bang out a ton of code on that thing. particularly a big fan of the arrow key placement.

If you can change it in the BIOS, then there's no problem, right?

Whats a bios?

OMIGAWSH THANK YOU

I picked up an X220 as my first thinkpad a couple weeks ago and this has been driving me more than a little batty.

> Thankfully you can change it in the bios.

Unlike on Macbooks and the Apple Wireless Keyboard. Grump.

Yes, you can use Karabiner[1] to swap the keys, but it's not at a low enough level that it works everywhere. Still, it's good enough for most use.

[1] https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/

What do you mean, not on a low enough level? I'm an avid user and donator of Karabiner, and I'm interested to know what you couldn't map?

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