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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

Still using Sun Unix keyboard with tilde on the right, and no obnoxious Windows keys ;) Control in the middle row on the left is also helpful in order not to stress the pinky.

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The Happy Hacking Keyboard has a similar layout, with Esc in the upper-left where it belongs, Ctrl in the middle-left where it belongs, and tilde in top-right where it belongs. :)

You can remap keys in modern operating systems. Any sane person will remap capslock to something they use more often (eg. ctrl or alt). Who needs capslock anyway?

YouTube commenters, and my boss. I haven't managed to break him of the habit of activating Caps Lock, pressing the key for letter he wants capitalised, then deactivating Caps Lock again.

Why stop him from doing something that works for him?

I used to think the same way until I suffered neurological damage that affects the sensory nerves in my fingers. Holding down the shift key while I type some all-caps text, like "STUPID_SHOUTY_MACRO_NAME", is uncomfortable, so I now find the caps lock key useful. It would be nice to have it as a control key, but I would want some other way to activate the caps lock function. Maybe a double tap on the shift key, like on the iPhone keypad, would work.

I actually find holding shift nicer for STUPIDLY_LONG_MACROS and whatnot since those underscores require shift and don't work with capslock.

> Who needs capslock anyway?

C and Java programmers.

Does your Sun keyboard have a "Stop" key? I seem to remember that for about 99% of the Sun machines I encountered hitting "Stop A" was pretty obnoxious.

Yes, all those extra keys work with OpenSolaris and OpenIndiana. Alas, they don't produce any scan codes with Linux. They are located in a separate area on the left, so they don't disturb your workflow.

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19683-01/806-6642/images/BR.unix....

They seem to work fine with RHEL 5 and Sun Type 6 keyboards. We do this at work on our systems. We just remap the keycodes to F keys. Something like xmodmap -e 'keycode 232 = F13' for the Stop key.

That's probably because I'm using Sun Type 5 with mini-din convertor to USB. Under OpenIndiana these keys work fine, but aren't working on Linux. Must be some driver specifics. Type 6 and Type 7 work better indeed, but they are not so ergonomic as Type 5 for some reason.

What's even more fun is that depending on your LOM configuration -removing- the keyboard can send a Stop-A.

This is not entirely hilarious when a junior sysadmin 'tidies up' the keyboards connected to the main database server (and even further from funny when the slave is currently down for maintenance ...)

The serial terminals did that as well and you couldn't unconfiure it on early sun4 prom revisions. You could get around it by using a rs232 breakout box with a resistor soldered in it and then screw that box to the back of the unit. That was standard practice. I remember when sysadmins were good with a soldering iron...

It was also the quickest way to get root. Stop-a would drop you into the monitor, then b -s to boot into single user mode. Congratulations, you are root, now just edit /etc/passwd to put in a new user "toor" with uid 0, and reboot into multiuser mode.

That didn't work for us a we netbooted everything off an e1000 and used the local disk for swap only.

I still had the e1000 (and disk array) which was skip dived until last year but the wife made me get rid of it :( She didn't want that kind of coffee table...

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