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Comment by akvadrako | Hacker News Reader

The most useless button (on average) in the world.

> The most useless button (on average) in the world.

The article is not really about the caps lock key. It's about stupid "data-driven" design.

It's mostly about the difficulty in actually interpreting data. It's very easy to construct an experiment that influences behavior to make a feature seem useful or useless. Intentionally or accidentally.

Science has known this for a long time. Designers seem intent on having to rediscover this on their own.

Cruise control for cool.

I think this goes to show that lots of data-driven processes are anything but - the data is amoral and does what you tell it to do - or finally confesses after enough torture.

Telemetry says feature isn't used hardly at all? Means we need to promote this feature (in the case of ads, perhaps)! Or it could mean we can remove it entirely, in the case of Mozilla.

In the end it's just used to confirm what we wanted to do anyway.

It's actually one my favorites, just remap it to CTRL or something similar and bam! You have one of the most ergonomically accessible modifier keys, much better than stretching your pinky all the time.

The first thing I do when I get a new computer is mapping caps lock to esc for vim :p

It's more standard (in the sense that the Sun keyboard did this) and more useful to map it to ctrl. You can use ^[ to get esc.

TIL! I'm so used to binding it to esc but maybe I'll give ctrl a go

I found it pretty useful to do both. A quick press is esc while holding it down is ctrl. I do find caps lock useful enough to keep it around still, so hitting left shift + right shift toggles that.

I use it for drop down terminal, pretty useful.

> The most useless button in the world.

Let me introduce you to SysRq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_request

It redeems itself by sharing keyboard real estate with Print Screen.

How about the Pause button? It almost never pauses anything when you press it.

Even on big things that have had hundreds of developers it is never considered. Try hitting the pause button while watching a video on YouTube for example. Nothing happens. Try hitting it in any major video game. There are a scant handful that recognise it. It is a forgotten key.

Scroll Lock is feeling super happy right now.

Scroll Lock makes for a perfect overlay shortcut (in Steam etc).

Remapped to escape and it's now one of my most used in Vim.

Especially given that, if you have some use case that requires it on a regular basis, there are a number of ways to programmatically simulate it.

If the simulation is shoddy it’s even more infuriating though.

On MacOS if I remap a key, it gets remapped for everything. I suppose the remapping is done before applications get the keystroke. Even if I connect to a remote computer, it’s getting the remapped keystroke.

On Linux, it’s just locally. On a remote system, the original keystroke is passed. The only way to get around that is with a programmable keyboard. But then your laptop keyboard doesn’t work the way you expect.

Fair enough. Although I (and I assume most others) have a big key on my MacBook that I hit way more often by accident than I actually use.

... which one's that? Fn?

Caps Lock. Though I don't really use Fn keys much generally.

Oh, sorry, got confused about the context I guess. I use the ordinary settings panel to make that an extra ctrl, anyway.

I was able to remap keys per keyboard on MacOS somehow ... can't quite recall how I did it (used it to remap command and windows key on the external but not the laptop keyboard).

Probably Karabiner Elements?

Yeah, I've used that, but MacOS has the modifier keys built in now - System Preferences -> Modifier Keys - Caps, Control, Option, Command, Function are all there.

There's utilities like keyd and kmonad to remap keys system wide on Linux. I've used keyd because the config is simpler for what I want. Works in tty, X11, remote. Also does layers and other fancy tricks.

I still use it every time I have to type a capital letter.

same here, and as you can see, my capslock key is broken

Have you ever played FPS games? Caps lock is usually used as a switch for silent/stealth movement, probably because it is one of the only buttons on Windows which keep state.

There is no reasons a game couldn't use any key as toggleable.

It's because it's right next to WASD. The state in Windows doesn't matter, if you enter games with it enabled you don't start the game in stealth mode. Like all other toggleables in games (menus, maps, aiming) it's based on input events toggling a state variable which is why it still works when you rebind stealth to a non-stateful key like ctrl or shift.

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