Sunday, August 19, 2012

cAPS Lock Anguish!

Several times a week I have been on the brink of writing this. It's time to get it off my chest. I curse whoever it was that decided to place the caps lock key to the left of the A on the keyboard. For what seems like one time in two when I go to type a letter "a" I hit caps lock instead (or as well.) I hAVE USually typed several more letters before I realize my mistake and have to bACKTRack, to the accompaniment of loud cursing.

A couple of decades ago, in the days of MS-DOS, it was possible to write a little program called a TSR (from Terminate and Stay Resident.) This program could intercept your keystrokes and convert them to anything you liked. I wrote one that trapped Shift+3 and turned it into the pound sign instead of the US default hash (#). Microsoft provided a utility called KEYB.COM that could do this but it occupied several K of memory and in those days you counted every byte.

I don't know if that is possible in Windows. But I'd really love a program that could intercept the caps lock key and turn it into an A (or rather, an a) unless you gave it a long press!
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6 comments:

  1. VE9KK Sunday, August 19, 2012 7:23:00 pm

    Good afternoon Julian, my keyboard for some reason it is the space bar sometimes you hit it and itdoesnotspace....it drives me nut!!! very soon the keyboard will find a new home in the field out the back of my house.

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  2. DD5CFSunday, August 19, 2012 7:51:00 pm

    Thanks for your post Julian, you could pry the Caps lock button off with your screwdriver.
    73 Colin DD5CF / G1ZOS

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  3. PierreMonday, August 20, 2012 7:21:00 am

    Hi Julian,

    I share your frustration.....

    I found the following info, might be of value:

    http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/disable_caps_lock/

    73, Pierre ZS6A

    http://zs6a.blogspot.com/

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  4. UnknownMonday, August 20, 2012 8:45:00 am

    Thank you Pierre! That stuff looks very useful!

    Julian, G4ILO

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  5. AnonymousThursday, September 27, 2012 6:17:00 am

    Hi there! As for Caps Lock, I researched this a while ago, and there's a quick and easy Registry change you can make, which defeats the Caps Lock problem by changing it into an additional Control key (very handy, and it's what keyboards a long time ago used to be).

    It's on my blog: http://krellan.livejournal.com/51518.html

    Hope this helps!
    Josh

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  6. jon_izSunday, September 30, 2012 9:15:00 pm

    Hi Julian, you could just turn on sticky keys, this way, every time you hit caps lock, you will get an audible bleep. At least that way you will rarely get past a couple of characters before realising...
    Jon G7OMN

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