Change Your Mac’s Caps Lock Key to Something Useful
These days, the main purpose of Caps Lock is to infuriate people whenever they press it by mistake. The key is so unused that there are even calls for it to be removed (Google doesn’t even include it on their new Chromebooks). If you find that the Caps Lock key on your Mac often serves no other purpose than accidentally TURNING YOU INTO AN EVIL PRINTER, you can make it more useful.
Why do our computers have capital letters at all?
Capital blocking was useful: even before computers, we had shift blocking on typewriters that physically shifted and locked the keys in a different position, allowing you to type capital and minor characters without having to hold down the shift key. While this made a lot of sense in an era when keys were more cumbersome to press in tandem, things are different with modern computer keyboards.
First, Caps Lock only allows you to enter capital letters, not minor characters. Secondly, the keys on our keyboards today are much easier to press than on typewriters – it takes almost no effort for most able-bodied typists to hold down the shift key when typing letters you want to capitalize, and most of us don’t (intentionally) capitalize. so often.
For a while, Caps Lock was more of a nuisance than a useful key. However, if you want to use the key on your Mac, it’s easy to do so.
How to change Caps Lock to something else on your Mac
To get started, open System Preferences > Keyboard , then select Modifier Keys. Here you will see a set of keys on the keyboard, the action of which can be changed. However, the most useful by far is blocking capital letters: click the blocking capital letters drop-down menu to find the following actions you can assign to the key:
- Caps Lock
- Control
- Option
- Team
- The escape
- the globe
- Inaction
In my opinion, the key action that makes the most sense here is escape: that’s how I first learned about this key mapping feature, since my MacBook Pro came without a physical escape key. However, turning my unused Caps Lock key into an Escape option gave me some extra precision that I lacked before.
Of course, many MacBooks (and all Bluetooth Magic Keyboards) now have physical escape keys, so you may not see the need for another one. In this case, you can choose any of the other options, but most of us probably won’t need any of them. We already have two command keys and two option keys, and although we only have one control key, it is on the same side of the keyboard as Caps Lock. Again, too much.
In that case, the best feature for Caps Lock is, in my opinion, nothing. Select “No action” from the dropdown and your Caps Lock key becomes a tiny museum on your keyboard: one that once had a purpose but no longer, that is lovingly kept on board despite being ignored. (Is this “something useful” as promised in the title of this article? It’s no coincidence that typing all caps is actually useful.)
However, your keyboard is yours: this setting lets you remap multiple keys to do whatever you want, opening up a lot of possibilities for different use cases. If you need five escape keys, go ahead. If you want each key to do something different than the name printed on it, go for it. In fact, anything is better than PRINTING IN CAPITALS WHEN YOU DON’T WANT IT AND CORRECTING THE RECORDING WITH A SMALL “sorry, capital letters”.