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2 votes c/freepost Posted by ComicSans — 2 votes, 6 commentsSource

I see this proposed by the Emacs people every other day, and they miss how incredibly Latin-centric their idea is. Typing Greek diacritics on capital letters finger-fumbler without at least Caps Lock on.

Is CAPS used that much more with non-Latin languages? Keyboard layouts have dedicated keys for special symbols, in every language. This rings true with me “It’s taking up prime real estate, and it’s not paying its rent any more. A toggle with the same functionality could easily be activated in a number of different ways.”

Is CAPS used that much more with non-Latin languages?

It’s probably not used at all in Cyrillic. My point is about standard Greek spelling and it’s diacritics on capital letters either word initially or in all caps environments (and cf European French that simply accepted that diacritics on capital letters are not worth the hassle).

A shift toggle is probably an acceptable replacement, but get MS and Apple to support it. Greek lost a whole punctuation mark because MS never bothered to include it in the MS Greek keyboard layout (its semicolon, the middle dot “·”).

Something similar happens with Italian as well; instead of À È É Ì Ò Ù you often find A’ E’ I’ O’ U’ even on official documents.

My caps lock key enables another layer which lets me navigate with my right hand. eg while holding caps lock, the home row on my right hand becomes arrow keys. I’ve also made it easy to use home, end, pg up, pg down, delete, and backspace with this layer. It’s an Ergodox.

So that’s already a re-purpose of they key as suggested in the article