What is the use of a Caps-Lock? Who needs to always write in capitals?
All it does for me is get in the way. I accidentally hit it about three times a week, and then I end up TYPING IN CAPITALS FOR A WHOLE SENTENCE WITHOUT ME REALISING IT.
I hate that, I have to totally retype the sentence, it sucks.
Who actually uses it? I mean, you can hold your little finger on the Shift key while you type, it’s not that awkward.
Cap-lock comes in handy during oh-so-naughty cybersex:
Torgo: OH YEAH BABY!!! OH BABY!!! GIVE IT UP YOU SWEET LITTLE ASS-MUFFIN!!!
Jane123: I’M NOTIFYING AOL IF YOU DON’T STOP IM’ING ME!!!
“My hovercraft is full of eels.”
INTEGER I
DOUBLE D
DO 20 I = 1,10
PRINT 10, “I HAVE A LOVELY BUNCH OF COCONUTS”
10 FORMAT (A30)
20 CONTINUE
STOP
END
Woops – forgot that the comment character goes in column 1. Darn it, now it’ll never compile.
The only time I ever use it is at work. On some official documents, sections have to be all caps. Even that’s pretty rare. On some reports I use it for headers, mainly in outline formats.
And I’m constantly forgetting to toggle it off.
Personal quirk: I’m a touch typist but somehow never got the knack of using my pinkies for the shift keys. I always slew my thumb under my palm and under to hit “shift”. Is that peculiar or what?
Veb
While this situation is on the eve of change, I’ll nevertheless comment.
I have for several years shared a network with my partner (five systems, two people) where we both jump from machine to machine. She does a lot of cartographic stuff where labeling of features is done in all caps, so she tends to leave the toilet seat up, if you catch my drift. It works for her, but not for me.
So, I understand your frustration (NumLock’s another one), but I also understand why the feature exists.
IT HELP’S THE NEW GUYS SPOTT THE TROLLS AL-MOST EMMEDIATLY.
At the very least I think it should be moved to the nether regions of the keyboard where the print screen and scroll lock keys live in eternal obscurity.
RJ21X#1
32XHGL123456 X-M
32XHGL123456 REC
96IBSD234567
96HWDA23452
72CSV1048
for thoses of you who don’t know, they are phone circuit numbers (digital 56k, ISDN, Analog 56k, private line). they would look mighty strange in lowercase. CapLock works for me
CAPS LOCK? who cares?
whatever
Dave, I was gonna mention that cuz I work in MAN data circuit provisioning too (36LODN123456DC, etc.), but couldn’t imagine there would be one other person that would know what I was talking about.
Looks like all the responses so far have been either work related or smut related, so I still say that damned button needs to be moved to a less popular area on the keyboard.
Unless anybody can come up with a reason why somebody would need to toggle the caps lock on & off frequently in the course of regular computer use.
What is the Sysrq key for?
Scroll Lock… now there is a useless key! 
I just found the winner. On the top right of my W98 keyboard, I have a key called “Fn”.
I have pressed it about 20 times and it does absolutely nothing. I can imagine “Fn” standing for “function”. But then WHY DOESN’T IT HAVE A FUNCTION??
Caps Lock is useful enough - see above. I wanna know about “Fn”.
Coldfire
Voted Poster Most Likely To Post Drunk
"You know how complex women are"
opus
I agree that the key is is a very BAD SPOT, BECAUSE YOU CAN ACCIDENTLY HIT IT.
BTW
[36LODN123456DC]
I have never seen a LODN crt, just curious what kind it is. I assume DC is Washington DC, as all crts here end in NY.
also to add to my colection, what is the ANI number there?
Coldfire wrote
A lot of times, laptops will have a ‘Fn’ key to do the numeric key pad. This key is like a shift/alt/ctrl key; you press it in conjunction with another key.
For my money, they should get rid of the whole F1-F12 row. I do use a couple of the sequences, Alt-F4 (close window), F5 (refresh), and occasionally F1 (help), but they could easily map those into some other ctrl or alt keystrokes.
The Function keys are used a lot in games. Especially Flight Simulators and such like, but also in weapons selection or display screens for Quake-ish shoot-em-ups.
From Opus:
Well, I do a lot of spreadsheets, word processing of different types of docs, as well as a lot of power point stuff each day, and use it frequently.
But that’s just me.
I gather rain…
Caps lock? Christ, I have to turn it off when I post here. My caps are locked on for nearly all of my work. Have you never seen technical/engineering drawing? The text is nothing but caps. And they are really BIG sheets of paper, too!
Many manufacturers already supply caps-locks with every unit they sell, but making them mandatory will never solve society’s problems. The bad people will never use them, and innocents will continue to be victimized.
“Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known” - Michel Gyquem de Montaigne
Casdave types this on an antideluvian keyboard:
A what key? What the heck are you typing on, anyway?
I once did data input on a system the name of which I know not, but it predated MSDOS and the keyboard had keys with funny names like “Clear Entry” and “Feed Line”. I think the box to which it was connected was running at something like 4 MHz. This was 1997, by the way, in case you’re imagining the 1970s or something.
Sysrq?
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