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!

6 comments:

VE9KK said...

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.

DD5CF said...

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

Pierre said...

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/

Unknown said...

Thank you Pierre! That stuff looks very useful!

Julian, G4ILO

Anonymous said...

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

jon_iz said...

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