Google Wants To Take Away Your Capslock Key

heptapod writes "Slashdot reported earlier about Google's Chrome notebook and keen-eyed readers would have noticed the lack of a caps lock key. 'According to Google, this will improve the quality of the comments, because people will not be able to write all in capital letters. I'm not a fan of the caps lock key myself. I never use it, so it can go to hell, for all I'm concerned. But taking away choice from people is not good, especially when this is not going to improve the quality of comments.'"

You can't fix stupid

[elrous0]

Those of us who use it sparingly or for specialized reasons will be deprived of it. And those who USE IT TO ON EVERYTHING WITHOUT REALIZING IT'S THE EQUIVALENT OF SHOUTING will still be stupid. And stupid people will find a way to be annoying no matter what you do.

You could take every key but "a" away and websites/services will still be filled with denizens sporting aol email addressees posting:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaa

e.e. cummings approves

[eldavojohn]

And stupid people will find a way to be annoying no matter what you do.

Like just holding down the shift key?

Good Riddance

[Sonny Yatsen]

The Caps Lock key is an arcane relic of the ancient IBM keyboards and for most users, it's completely unnecessary. It screws up passwords, for one, and it is in a position that is way too easy to hit accidentally. Besides, there's been a movement to ditch it for ages now, and thus far nobody's complained. Did nobody notice that the OLPC computer also ditched the CapsLock? Besides, anyone who still wants to use all caps still has the shift button.

Re:Agreed

[Kilrah_il]

OTOH, database programmers aren't the intended target audience of Chrome OS. Just sayin'

Re:Choice

[John Hasler]

> Can you still buy netbooks with capslock? Yes? Then you still have choice.

In fact, you have more choice.

Re:Good Riddance

[rsimpson]

I don't have a problem with them taking away the functionality of the Caps Lock key, but I do have a problem if they take the actual physical key away. I currently have it mapped to Ctrl because it is in such a convenient place just left of my pinky, and navigating around vim I use Ctrl a lot. So the function of Caps Lock is pointless, but the actual key itself is very important.

Re:You can't fix stupid

[rockout]

You may not, but apparently everyone else needs to RTFA a little more closely. It appears to me that it's very likely that the reason for omitting caps-lock is just to save space, and a little joke about message board comments was taken a little too seriously by the so-called writer at Gizmodo. It also seems very likely that a double-tap on the shift key will toggle on caps-lock, as it does on the iPhone.

Really, how can you read that article and not come away with the feeling that the writer is a little clueless, or trying to create a story where there isn't one, or both?

Re:I'm a bit scared

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want to make sure I have this right...
Was it before or after you submitted a bug to their open bugtracking system for their open source operating system about not following a self-proclaimed "pseudo standard" that you just made up when you realized that Google was "becoming a Microsoft"?

Re:Agreed

[rubycodez]

it's a *required* coding convention by company policy every place I've worked, the SQL reserved words are capitalized

Re:You can't fix stupid

[rockout]

I agree. The level of disappointment was heightened, though, by the fact that Taco took this "google wants to control your CAPS" and ran with it as if it were fact (is he a dumbass or also trying to create a story?) and there were some 200+ posts that were debating the merits of Google doing this. Did it really go over that many people's heads?

Re:Case Sensitive Language

[gstoddart]

Well, many people feel that the tokens camelCase and CamelCase should never be allowed to refer to different symbols...

Well, I've just always programmed in languages that are case sensitive ... C, C++, C#, Java ... the few I've bumped into that are case insensitive are scripting languages.

I guess I just learned that CAMEL, Camel, CaMel and camel are all different literals. It doesn't rely on an interpreter to say "oh, you meant this, I'll ignore it". I'm used to a compiler saying "I have no idea what camEl is".

And, from experience, I'd rather have camel case than that whole "Hungarian Notation" which more or less made variables pointlessly hard to read.

Guess it depends on what you learned with, but I find case-insensitive brings its own problems. ASCII provided us with a lexical sort ordering (for good or for ill), and throwing that away isn't always a good thing.