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Comment by solarexplorer | Hacker News Reader

I like to remap Caps Lock to Control to get a similar layout as the old Sun keyboards. It also makes pressing the Control key a lot easier.

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If you have a real keyboard you can use the pad of your hand to hit the control key in the bottom left corner, which some people find even easier. This is definitely the easiest way to hit Ctrl-Q.

Apple too. Was a sad day when Sun and Apple gave up that fight.

At least with macOS you don’t actually need control very often.

Emacs + iTerm: I need it all the time.

Wasn't just Apple and Sun, it was almost everyone. The first IBM PC keyboards, the Apple machines, Atari and Amiga, almost all Unix workstations, etc. all had it where caps-locks sits now. I can't remember the exact IBM keyboard where it switched, but the Model M moved it and maybe a bit before that.

Caps-locks is such an infrequently used key to be taking up such valuable real estate.. I've never gotten mentally used to control being banished to the lower left. I remap on every keyboard I get.

The other thing Apple got right and PCs screwed up: the bumps on the home row used to be on ‘d’ and ‘k’. That way, even if your right hand was offset one to the right, you’d still feel the bump and notice it was under the wrong finger, which is much easier than noticing that you don’t feel a bump at all.

I don’t recall whether other vendors got that right.

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