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Comment by neverminder | Hacker News Reader

I've got one of those from "Only on WIndows" series. One of my colleagues uses WIndows and tends to remote in from home. Unfortunately when a cleaner cleans the office after hours she sometimes accidentally hits the CAPS key and he can't log in anymore remotely. His solution was to rip out the CAPS key and cover the hole with duct tape.

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I do this, too. The first thing I do when I get a new keyboard is to remove the caps lock key. I never used it in my 20 years of PC usages and I don't get why it's still there.

Back in my CounterStrike gaming days I would also remove the Windows key because it would crash the game when accidentally pressed.

I work about 30/70 on Mac and Windows. I have the caps lock key mapped to ctrl on Windows and cmd on Mac since they’re roughly equivalent. Makes switching my muscle memory when I switch my OS far less necessary. No more hitting ctrl-c to copy on Mac and instead sending a SIGKILL to the terminal!

On Windows, CapsLock is my Push-To-Talk key, so I remap it to F9 or something "useless" via KeyTweak.

On Linux, it's my meta/compose/whatever key, so I can write äöü on UsIntl via caps-aou ( https://github.com/winks/dotfiles/blob/master/.us-intl-germa... )

DON’T remove caps lock!!! Use it as an application switcher!

Some of my most used shortcuts:

Caps + C = Chrome

Caps + S = Spotify

Caps + A = Atom

Caps + T = Terminal

+1 for removing windows key if gaming

On Windows, Win+1 launches the first app in the taskbar, Win+2 launches the second, etc.

That's a really good idea. Most of my application switching needs are covered by the built-in Windows "Win+1 opens first icon on the taskbar, Win+2 opens the second...", but this could cover the lesser used ones like Outlook.

Ahh the good old CounterStrike quick exit! If you were lucky you could alt-tab back in, but you'd have a big mouse arrow where your reticle used to be :D

I ended up coding a utility (in VS6!) to disable the windows key when you launched the game.

Map escape key to it. Especially if you use vim.

I map ALT to CTRL and CapsLock to ALT, so I don't have to use my pinky to hot CTRL

Excel powerusers get rid of F1:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-one-key-that-infuriates-b...

It's used by the Japanese IME on Windows: Ctrl+CapsLock - hiragana input, Alt+CapsLock - katakana input, Shift+CapsLack - alphanumeric input.

I like your typo in the last capslock, it accurately describes my capslock key ;)

Though, that actually is interesting, and you made me read up ab bit on Japanese.

My wife would kill me. She uses it to enter uppercase first letters. Just won’t (or can’t) work the shift key.

dude that windows key always messed me up, esp because my computer was a load of crap, and it took hella days to minimize/maximize the window again, usually I had to reboot the machine.

I've mapped my caps key to ｆｕｌｌｗｉｄｔｈｔｅｘｔ, initially for quick-response memeing but it turns out it's actually quite helpful for increasing expressiveness on various chat protocols.

That's actually pretty cool - how do you accomplish that? (And on which OS?)

Not a hack, but once we couldn't figure out why a printer dropped off the network.

Turns out the cleaners were thorough enough to clean deep down behind a desk and turned off a surge protector that a 5-port network switch was plugged into.

I remapped my caps key to control on every machine I use. I find it much more ergonomic than the standard left-control location.

I use AutoHotKey to remap it to launch TotalCommander.

Does AutoHotKey function on the login screen?

Nope -- I remap Caps Lock to control, and if I'm not careful I can wind up logged in with it stuck in caps mode, and no way to get lowercase characters without locking the screen, turning off all-caps mode, and logging in again. Luckily, this is hard to do :-)

I use AHK to remap CapsLock to double-click to reduce the strain on my mouse hand, but I can access the original CapsLock function via shift-CapsLock. Try it -- maybe that will help you.

That's a fantastic idea! Unfortunately, I use JetBrains IDEs, so I have lots of ctrl-shift keychords I couldn't live without.

WTF? How come I worked around three years on RDP clients and stuff and did not know about this?

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