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Comment by Tankenstein | Hacker News Reader

I really recommend rebinding caps lock to escape. macOS lets you do that natively in keyboard setting nowadays. Still muscle memory to relearn, of course.

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I got used to capslock in less than a day when I got MBP. I recommend BetterTouchTool to remove the faux escape key and replace it with something as annoying as "Previous track".

After listening to the same track for a few hours it really stuck.

Many of us remapped Caps Lock to Ctrl years ago. I know there's a way to use it for both but it's not smooth because it adds a firing delay.

But you can't rebind esc to anything (natively), so you lose caps lock. Am I the only one who declares constants and envvars in capitals? And how do people write SQL? With their elbow on the shift key?

The new versions of sql don’t require capital letters on all the keywords. :p

More seriously color syntax highlighting works far better than capitalizing almost everything in sight. I’d recommend dropping the caps convention.

Caps for envvars is not a cosmetic convention, it's a style convention to indicate if a variable was sourced from the shell/parent/sourced file vs an internal definition.

Caps for constants is a long standing convention in many style guides and standard libraries.

You appear to be referring to shell scripts. I do not have an opinion on shell script capitalization. However, my opinion on capital keywords in SQL is that it is a relic of an older time when it was used to help visual parsing of the query.

Going further I’m of the opinion that color syntax highlighting does that job far better thus rendering the capital convention obsolete.

Note: you may have a different opinion than me and if you do the laws of the code formatting holy war demand that I assert that you’d be wrong.

acronyms?

I either hold down shift for short vars or use the vim uppercase motion. After a variable is declared then I use autocomplete.

SQL does not have to be written in uppercase generally. If you care, use an autoformatter.

I have Karabiner Elements configured to toggle CapsLock with the LShift+RShift combination. Pretty handy, and unlikely to ever hit it accidentally.

I've always just typed constants and SQL with my pinky on the left Shift key. It feels easier than having to toggle Caps Lock all the time.

In situations where I'm excited and messaging my friends to yell, I've typed entire sentences mostly holding down Left Shift. After some experimentation, it looks like even for normal sentence capitalization, I never use Right Shift unless I'm typing one-handed.

I wonder if there's a way to configure a double-press of left Shift to enable Caps Lock, like we're used to on phone keyboards.

Seems like Karabiner can handle that: https://github.com/pqrs-org/Karabiner-Elements/issues/346

Karabiner Elements is free and will let you bind Esc to Caps Lock. It actually allows general remapping for instance I use a Microsoft Sculpt keyboard with my Mac and have that stupid menu key remapped to be a second Option.

I stopped using caps in SQL a few years ago, it changed my life for the better

Yeah I SHIFT everything capital letters. Feel better than Capslock. Not a Mac user but I wish my laptop has semi-full size keyboard (that includes everything excluding the number pad), but that's too big for laptops I guess :(

Using Karabiner, I have caps lock mapped to escape, and shift+caps lock toggles caps lock.

Best move is to bind `jj` to escape.

Except that doesn’t work in every other app that doesn’t understand vi keys.

I’ve been doing this, as prompted by being assigned a touchstrip MacBook at my last job.

Have to say I was able to retrain pretty quickly. jj is now my first instinct even on full-sized keyboards. I now think it’s really an improvement. All about staying on that home row as much as possible..

Caps Lock is already my Ctrl key, I don't want to get cramps everytime I press Ctrl-C.

What kind of monster doesn’t map Caps Lock to CTRL??

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