the CAPSLOCK key should be banished from the keyboard?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Damnit! I knew I was going to get some people here with legitimate uses. But you’re in the minority!

There really ought to be some filter in forums, etc, or in IM’s that parses all ALLCAPS posts, messages, etc, to be lower case.

It’s not just kids either. Have you ever read some tech support forums? That’s where I see it the most. Oh, and in emails with some impassioned plea (WHY WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?!?!?!?!?!?)

This is probably the most shouting that has been done in the SDMB for a long time, come to think of it.

But programming? The only one I know of that people routinely use all caps is in HTML but that doesn’t require them. But then again I don’t really know any other programming languages, but I have seen more than a few lines of code.

22

I dont’ use it for programming, I use it for CAD work. Generally, notes on drawings are done in all caps. Btu I admit this is a specialized usage and I wouldn’t mind if it was a bit more difficult to engage.

23

It’s often useful for alpha-numeric data entry.

Getting rid of it wouldn’t fix a damned thing - people who shout would just use the shift key.

A certain percentage of internet users are secretly Mr. Gumby and his wife. It’s not just alt.sociology.bashing-two-bricks-together, anymore - it’s pandemic.

24

The SDMB does this. If your thread title or post is in ALL CAPS it will lowercase it for you.

25

I REALLY HAD TO TEST THIS OUT, WITH A FEW CHALLENGES SUCH AS LONDON AND BRIAN.

Edit: Hah. In seriousness - I use it regularly, for the alphanumeric entry reasons suggested above. Not everything is prose, you know.

26

I want them to move the num lock key. I use the number pad a lot without looking and invaribly I over shoot the 7 and hit num lock. It’ll be several “numbers” later that I notice and I’ve moved all over the spreadsheet and entered nothing.

27

What Mishell said. I use it all the time. It’s very handy for typing in all those Microsoft constants and such. And I never use Word.

28

My keyboard has no caps lock. On my notebooks, I’ve got it mapped to ctrl.

I do 99% of my text editing in vim, which has a handy feature to change a region of text mode to caps: gU<motion>, eg gU5j to uppercase the next five lines.

vim rules.

29

A bit of an O RLY moment when I spotted the side of the Tab key :wink:

30

Jeez. No dedicated caps key.

31

One popular practice is to use all-caps for variables that represent constants. Like:

final static int MINUTES_IN_DAY = 24 * 60;

32

What, you program in (caps lock) COBOL, perhaps (caps lock) FORTRAN?

to quote an anonymous internet source “cap lock is cruise control to cool” (/sarcasm)
haha as a side note, our discussion of keyboards and programming prompted google ads; 2x on new keyboard technology, and one on “Coffee exposed”

33

Another tool to use.

We use to remap our dedicated terminals at work but the function was built into the mainframe software. Personally, I use a regular keyboard with my laptop.

34

Yep it’s a pain when your entering data and find it wasn’t doing numbers for the last 20 sets of data. I had some old stats software that you needed to start over if you didn’t correct the set bebore hitting enter. It wasn’t as big a problem when that got replaced, but it still sucks.

35

What if someone has poor eyesight and needs the allcaps so they can see what they’ve written before they post their reply?

36

FUCK YOU, MOTHERFUCKERS!

[sub]sorry[/sub]

37

What I want is a key that caps and un-caps selected text. Now that would be genuinely useful.

38

Here’s another app that will turn it, and the Insert key, off. Not as fancy as Toggler, but good enough for me. And it’s free.

39

i don’t know. i personally like the caps key. especially if you are using an odd font.

40

>But I use the caps lock key frequently, for example in programming.

Well, not that much, I guess. More often in data entry. But I did do a lot of programming this past week with a standalone datalogger that you talk to through COM1 to set up. It only recognizes caps, except within string literals. All its statements are in caps.