I see it every day and it’s just crawling up my bemused last nerve. There are all these people in the world who, instead of holding down the Shift key while they type a letter to get a capital letter, they hit “Caps Lock”, the letter, and then “Caps Lock” again. WTF? Were they dropped on the head too much as babies? Unable to muster the minute amount of coordination required to hit two keys at once?
Sorry, I just had to share my complete non-understanding of why any human being who can comprehend the act of typing would do that. Some of them are really fast at it too - decent typists who have the world’s stupidest method. Seriously, WTF?
I hope any of you who do that have the decency to hide your heads in shame rather than come out with your perversion in this thread.
It’s not complicated it’s mainly just basic literacy issues. The only people using all CAPS these days are old people (and not the smart ones), people with mental issues, young kids (not the smart ones), and people with very limited writing skills and/or very rudimentary educations.
You’re talking about people who use the Caps Lock key instead of the shift key, right? I rarely see this; it’s probably a result of people who learned to type on typewriters, or whose jobs consist of nothing but plain typing – they’re not used to making two-key combinations (Ctrl- and Alt-).
IIRC, that’s how our old Olivetti typewriter’s “shift” key worked. Perhaps these people learned on a mechanical typewriter, or were taught to type by a course that neglected that things have moved on a bit recently?
Typewriters are where the shift key originated - it shifted the carriage up to allow the upper-case letters to be put on the paper. Two key combinations like holding shift and pressing a letter goes back to the beginning.
If this is related at all, it’s the other way around. The Caps-lock, type-a-letter, Caps-lock pattern is probably people to don’t type much, never got the hang of the keyboard, and are basically hunting and pecking.
I, on the other hand, will avoid the caps-lock key. I’ll type an ALL-CAPS word by holding the shit-key, typing all my letters, then release the shift key. Sometimes I have to switch from the left to the right shift key and back again to make it all work out. I’ve never gotten good at the caps lock key.
Caps-lock is for when I type a whole paragraphs in caps, and even then I’ll hit the shift key accidentally making the paragraphs have scattered lower case letters like, “iT WAS A dARK and sTORMY NIGHT.”
I seem to recollect that when I typed on a mechanical typewriter (in the 1970s) I often used the Caps Lock key in that way - because the carriage was so heavy (for my weak teen fingers) to lift that I preferred to make sure of the heavy lifting before typing the capital.
Holy crap! My keyboard DOES have this “Shift” key you guys are talking about. How long has this been around? My computer was replaced last fall, so I’m assuming “Shift” came out around then. People get set in their ways; you can’t expect everyone to dive into a new way of doing things immediately.
Wait, my keyboard actually has two of these things. I’m going to wait until the competing placements of “Shift” work themselves out before I try to use it.
I’d take you out back to the Pit and thrash you justly, but I just can’t be bothered right now.
No, I wasn’t dropped on my head too much as a baby. No, I’m not unable to muster the minute amount of coordination required to hit two keys at once.
I’m sorry that my chosen style of typing qualifies as “the world’s stupidest method,” but with all due respect, shove it. I have no reason to hide my head in shame – perhaps, instead, you should… who are you watching so closely as to notice how they are typing? And why?
FWIW, I type at roughly 90-95 WPM. I don’t really use the shift key. What’s it to you?
The Caps Lock key says ‘Caps’ on it, so it’s obvious that it’s something to do with capital letters. The shift key gets you the other symbol on those keys that have two symbols. I’m betting that if standard keyboards had upper and lower case legends on all the letter keys the people who use Caps Lock would have twigged.
I worked with people who turned Caps Lock on first thing in the morning and left it on all day - in some cases, they thought typing in all caps looked better, in other cases, they were to stupid to know when to capitalise, so they left Caps Lock on to make the issue moot.
Because people can’t remember their passwords for printing and you have to watch them to make sure it isn’t mixed caps or all caps or something - the passwords are case sensitive. Of course he forgot his password and we had to go fishing around in the system to retrieve it.
In other words, he had actually lost his password, and it wasn’t a case of improper capitalization. Ergo, there was no functional error in his choice to use the caps lock key vs. the shift key.
Remind me again why you’re so bothered by the habits of others that don’t affect you in the slightest?
atomicbadgerrace, I’ve been watching you type your posts here. Did you know your wrist was leaning against the “Taking this all too seriously” key the whole time?
Because somebody allowed this little boy to acquire a bad habit which will only slow him down later in life?
ETA - yes, yes, you’re about to tell me how fast you type with a handicap like that, but, you know, there’s no need not to give a child the best of technique and advantage. There’s a kid who’s a high school wrestler even though he’s missing his forearms, hands, and legs - yeah, but he’s a great wrestler in spite of that and it would be better for him in life if he had all his limbs.
