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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

It really surprises me that the Happy Hacking Keyboard brand has stuck with their key layout. For a more conventional layout one might consider keychron.

https://www.keychron.com/

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The HHKB layout is a copy of the layout from old Sun UNIX keyboards: https://i.stack.imgur.com/D8RsW.jpg

I like it more than the conventional PC keyboard layout, it makes Esc and Ctrl more easy to access, and means you can press Backspace without having to stretch your pinky as far.

For a split version, there's https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-q11-qmk-custom-me...

Now, if only there was a track-pad or -ball

Why would anyone need a capslock?

To rebind it to Escape of course. :D Works wonders if you're using vim or vim mode somewhere.

Elsewhere in the comments, someone said "I want dedicated keys for arrows / function keys, I use these frequently enough that I don't want to hold a modifier".

Some programming languages type constants in UPPER_SNAKE_CASE. -- The same rationale applies: it's easy to understand why someone would prefer to avoid having to hold a modifier key for that. -- I quite like Caps Word as an improvement on CapsLock https://docs.qmk.fm/#/feature_caps_word

Though, I'd agree that CapsLock isn't important enough to put where it is on a traditional keyboard. (Nor does the spacebar need to be 6 keys wide..).

Besides the better caps word (by the way, you can have it in software in Win/Linux apps like https://github.com/jtroo/kanata/blob/main/docs/config.adoc#c...) you can also toggle capslock with e.g. a double tap while having on-hold functionality to the more useful Control, so you still wouldn't need to hold any modifier key

I largely use it to switch layers, eg. caps + hjkl turns into arrow keys

BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE WRONG ON THE INTERNET

First time I have ever used caps-lock for it's intended purpose. It's surprisingly liberating. I RECOMMEND GIVING IT A GO, IT'S LIKE THERAPY. Maybe we should go in the opposite direction and add even more dedicated keys for all forms of cringe-mode typing - leetspeak, texting, emoji-poisoned, valley-girl, German etc.

GPT powered politeness toggle maybe?

I remap 'both shift keys' to toggle CAPSLOCK.

I write a lot of ${BASH}

I remapped my caps lock as a modifier to let me use my central row keys as arrow keys, also stuff like caps look + space bar = return, caps lock + Z = delete and so on. It's quite handy.

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