Why make caps lock into backspace? Control has always felt a much more natural option to me.
Usually, when I am pressing backspace, I am taking a mental break anyways (even if only a tiny one), so I am ok with having a bit of travel to press it.
Usually, when I am pressing backspace, I am taking a mental break anyways (even if only a tiny one), so I am ok with having a bit of travel to press it.
Because you use it that often. Or at least, I do. Maybe you're a much better typer than I am, and for that matter, much better at correctly typing what I want in the first place, but I consider it an important key.
One issue with using statistics to layout your keyboard is that you if you analyze your layout via text corpus, you'll come up with a usage of 0 on the backspace key. This is inaccurate. You really ought to do an analysis based on actual key usage, but that data is much harder to come by. (You'll probably just have to take your lumps on the possibility that changing the layout would itself change key usage.)
Oh, and per other comments on the difficulty of trying out new keyboard layouts... rewriting how you do all the letters is very challenging. But if you are interested merely in trading Caps Lock for backspace, you can literally try this at any time; adjustment will take on the order of 5 minutes, tops, as long as you unmap the original backspace key. And it's about a minute to switch back if you don't like it. Professional keyboard users really ought to be people who have tweaked at least a key or two, if not tried entire layout switches. It's so fast and easy to run the experiments.
setxkbmap -layout us -variant dvorak -option ctrl:swapcaps,compose:rctrl
(You can leave -variant dvorak out; the -option stuff will still work.)
The compose key, used to compose all kinds of characters from æ to ż, is one of those smart and fantastic options, and it works really intuitive. Just hit that key, then guess two characters (like a and e, or z and .) and voila.
It's also pretty neat that it supports stuff like ™ and ©.
Yeah, the other setting switches ctrl and capslock. My left pinky just really doesn't like the original place of ctrl, and caps is something I use only rarely.
The only time it really comes up is if I'm typing out constants in code. Yet, I have to type each only once and then autocomplete deals with it from there on out.