On MacOS if you remap your capslock to control there is a race condition on the login screen. If you use the control/capslock key to wake up your laptop and manage to time it right, you can enable capslock but not have a way to disable it (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?)).
Funny, I just had a version of this happen to me this morning on iPad OS using a folio keyboard.
I had just upgraded to iPadOS 15 and the caps-lock-as-control setting reverted to the default. I went into settings and changed it back, but I did so with caps lock accidentially enabled.
This left the folio keyboard stuck in caps lock. I had to go back into settings, set caps lock back to caps lock, press the caps lock key to disable, then I could make it a control key. But trickily, the setting change didn't seem to take effect until I swiped out of the screen where you change that setting.
Dunno, but in my country we use a QWERTZ layout where you can't write the letters Ě, Š, Č, Ř, Ž, Ý Á, Í, É without caps lock, because with Shift those keys produce 2, 3, 4, ..., 0
It was useful on some old machines that tended to prefer uppercase input. On typewriters, the shift lock key (which is slightly different) tended to be used when people wanted to add emphasis to a word or phrase.
As for modern computers, it is less useful. When one of the keyswitches on my keyboard failed, I replaced it with the keyswitch from the capslock since I figured it was the one key I was guaranteed to never use.
Capslock exists to make typing in allcaps easy. I use it most when I'm in a C project with lots of macros. I use it about as often as I use ten-key -- just enough to justify its existence, not enough to find alternatives in every os/editor/browser/etc that I use.
Sometimes I use caps lock for its intended purpose. Probably not nearly enough to justify its existence as a physical key that takes up space, but at least a little.
This is a rabbit hole that I followed as well. There's some good articles if you search for it.
Auto doesn't make total sense to me, but it seems originally the Romans had only the letters we know as capitals, and none of the extra characters like semicolon.
IIRC sometime in the middle ages lower case letters were added, but it's not clear to me why and how it ended up getting a bunch of different rules (eg German capitalises nouns but in English it's only proper nouns).
There are also theories out there about why our names appear in all-caps on government documents, relating to the concept of treating an individual as a 'corporation'.
Yeah, back when I was using Windows, I had RAlt mapped to Compose with WinCompose, and RAlt would get stuck occasionally when the system was under significant load, so I’d need to manually disable WinCompose, tap RAlt to clear its spurious down state, and then enable WinCompose again.
> (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?))
When I first started doing caps-lock-to-control, I mapped my physical control key to caps lock. Eventually, I stopped bothering and kept it as control.
I'm using Caps Lock key to switch between input languages, but I can still use the caps lock mode by pressing Shift + Caps Lock. This is macOS built-in functionality.
How would you remap the capslock key without using a hotkeys-like setup, such as Karabiner? I looked for a long time for a way to do that and couldn't figure it out.
