I have no capslock and I must scream

https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock.gmi

by mrzool • 4 years ago

897 519 4 years ago

memex.marginalia.nu

akvadrako• 4 years ago

The most useless button (on average) in the world.

ghaff6• 4 years ago

Especially given that, if you have some use case that requires it on a regular basis, there are a number of ways to programmatically simulate it.

2muchcoffeeman• 4 years ago

If the simulation is shoddy it’s even more infuriating though.

On MacOS if I remap a key, it gets remapped for everything. I suppose the remapping is done before applications get the keystroke. Even if I connect to a remote computer, it’s getting the remapped keystroke.

On Linux, it’s just locally. On a remote system, the original keystroke is passed. The only way to get around that is with a programmable keyboard. But then your laptop keyboard doesn’t work the way you expect.

Victerius• 4 years ago

I still use it every time I have to type a capital letter.

veonik• 4 years ago

same here, and as you can see, my capslock key is broken

msk-lywenn• 4 years ago

Scroll Lock is feeling super happy right now.

int_19h7• 4 years ago

Scroll Lock makes for a perfect overlay shortcut (in Steam etc).

reayn• 4 years ago

It's actually one my favorites, just remap it to CTRL or something similar and bam! You have one of the most ergonomically accessible modifier keys, much better than stretching your pinky all the time.

creakingstairs4• 4 years ago

The first thing I do when I get a new computer is mapping caps lock to esc for vim :p

throw3838• 4 years ago

I use it for drop down terminal, pretty useful.

Diti• 4 years ago

Have you ever played FPS games? Caps lock is usually used as a switch for silent/stealth movement, probably because it is one of the only buttons on Windows which keep state.

Gigachad• 4 years ago

There is no reasons a game couldn't use any key as toggleable.

zamadatix• 4 years ago

It's because it's right next to WASD. The state in Windows doesn't matter, if you enter games with it enabled you don't start the game in stealth mode. Like all other toggleables in games (menus, maps, aiming) it's based on input events toggling a state variable which is why it still works when you rebind stealth to a non-stateful key like ctrl or shift.

kbutler2• 4 years ago

The most useless button in the world.

Let me introduce you to SysRq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_request

rzzzt• 4 years ago

It redeems itself by sharing keyboard real estate with Print Screen.

jandrese2• 4 years ago

How about the Pause button? It almost never pauses anything when you press it.

Even on big things that have had hundreds of developers it is never considered. Try hitting the pause button while watching a video on YouTube for example. Nothing happens. Try hitting it in any major video game. There are a scant handful that recognise it. It is a forgotten key.

bombcar11• 4 years ago

Cruise control for cool.

I think this goes to show that lots of data-driven processes are anything but - the data is amoral and does what you tell it to do - or finally confesses after enough torture.

Telemetry says feature isn't used hardly at all? Means we need to promote this feature (in the case of ads, perhaps)! Or it could mean we can remove it entirely, in the case of Mozilla.

In the end it's just used to confirm what we wanted to do anyway.

another_story• 4 years ago

Remapped to escape and it's now one of my most used in Vim.

tablespoon4• 4 years ago

The most useless button (on average) in the world.

The article is not really about the caps lock key. It's about stupid "data-driven" design.

marginalia_nu6• 4 years ago

It's mostly about the difficulty in actually interpreting data. It's very easy to construct an experiment that influences behavior to make a feature seem useful or useless. Intentionally or accidentally.

Science has known this for a long time. Designers seem intent on having to rediscover this on their own.

quacked3• 4 years ago

This is exactly how it feels with every iteration of my company's new design. Let's disappear scroll bars! Let's hide the menu! Let's order sub-menus by frequency of use, rather than by alphabetical order! Let's get rid of border lines around text entry boxes! Let's make clickable and non-clickable text the same font, style, and color! Let's--

I do not understand why designers are so insistent on making tools so difficult and unpleasant to use.

tartoran• 4 years ago

Don’t be surprised. They’re brewing dark patterns.

quacked3• 4 years ago

I don't disagree with you in the slightest for most other software tools, but this is an internal tool that we're selling so that people can build their own applications. There's no advertising--in fact, the fewer seconds people spend inside the application, the better it is for our bottom line because it means we can pump out the applications faster.

kbutler2• 4 years ago

Because they are visual designers, not interaction designers, so appearance is the primary criteria, rather than visual affordances to guide the user.

Recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

quacked3• 4 years ago

Wonderful recommendation (I have read it). I don't think anyone should be allowed to design one single consumer product until they have it practically memorized.

Jerrrry• 4 years ago

Functional design ain't pretty.

brimble4• 4 years ago

What's crazy to me is that I was promised Back In The Day that everything would be sunshine and roses in software design, and especially in Web design, once the "digital natives" took over and all those bad ol' print designers retired or got pushed out—but it sure looks to me like the exact opposite happened.

ajmurmann• 4 years ago

I think there also is a conflict between interfaces that have a flat learning curve on one hand and interfaces that work extremely well once you are used to them. I think the second category gets too little attention. It's also much harder to user test the second category but for certain types of applications it's what should be preferred. Ideally you can have both a flat learning curve and high efficiency for experienced users. To me the JetBrains IDEs are an example of this compromise. Examples that are fabulous for experts are of course Vim and emacs

manachar• 4 years ago

"Move fast and break things" with a healthy does of deep disrespect for the user mixed into a young and mostly self taught discipline (UI/UX) based on nice sounding pseudo-science that cherry picks usability studies to meet aesthetic desires of the highest-paid opinion in the room.

The modern web disgusts and enrages me more often than not.

aaaaaaaaata• 4 years ago

It's one of few ways a small, scrappy firm can stand out —

talking to the user instead of taking the decision made by some investor/suit in a larger, less efficient firm.

_Algernon_2• 4 years ago

If UI designers were making a car, the pedals would switch spots for no apparent reason every year, and the steering wheel would turn into a trendy motion control interface.

colpabar2• 4 years ago

Sounds like the spotify app. Why can't there just be a static button to get me to my recommended weekly/daily playlists?

kloch• 4 years ago

This was a real problem until US Gov mandated "PRND" shift order, among other things.

Now, if they could just make the windshield wiper controls all work the same direction...

pixl97• 4 years ago

Now let's not give Tesla any ideas...

zestyping• 4 years ago

This is not all that far from what's happening with touchscreens in cars.

Pros of touchscreens:

- You can make the UI look like anything you want.

Cons of touchscreens:

- You can make the UI look like anything you want.

tempestn3• 4 years ago

You jest, but we're almost there with Tesla, where the wheel is no longer a wheel, the turn signals are two buttons (on the same side of the wheel) rather than a stalk, the gear shifter is removed and the car literally tries to guess whether you want to go forward or backward, and every other control is on a touchscreen, and does indeed move around or disappear into a menu at least every year.

mhh__• 4 years ago

Saab made a car with a centre console stick instead of a wheel once

duxup• 4 years ago

UI designers were making a car

https://www.consumerreports.org/video/view/cars/news/6272879...

LegitShady• 4 years ago

we've noticed you use the gas pedal significantly more than the brake pedal - in the next update we will be removing the brake pedal.

charcircuit• 4 years ago

and the steering wheel would turn into a trendy motion control interface.

The steering wheel is already motion controlled.

d0gsg0w00f• 4 years ago

This made me laugh and it also made me wonder if UI people have jokes about how annoying engineers are.

CSMastermind• 4 years ago

Lol you should look into car design pre-1970.

It was basically this.

creakingstairs4• 4 years ago

I think it's because they are usually targeting the design for the broadest audience, so they design for the lowest common denominators and simplify the screen as much as possible to streamline "the main flow" of their app. This involves removing as much elements as possible to cause the least confusion when they interact with the app for the first time.

This means that the app will work amazing and without thought ("it just works!") for 80% of the population but will be non-functional for the 20% of the population which includes power users and users who would have been willing to go through the initial learning curve for a more powerful app.

Just to note: I'm not deriding the "lowest common denominators" as I am definitely one for some domains. For example, I chose the app with the simplest deisgn for doing my taxes as I didn't want to spend time learning about taxes.

pmontra• 4 years ago

It's that once they did all the useful work they are not old enough to retire so they have to invent something to do. To be fair, most of us are doing only marginally useful work.

alecbz2• 4 years ago

It won't be "non-functional", just not as functional as they would have otherwise liked.

xigoi• 4 years ago

It's sad that more apps don't have a “power user mode” hidden somewhere in settings, which would give you the choice.

bsedlm• 4 years ago

what makes you think they're designing tools for you to use?

what if they're actually designing systems and schemes which use you? (in soviet russia ---and the modern day internet--- computer uses YOU)

I started trying to make a joke but now I'm not laughing :|

8ytecoder2• 4 years ago

Let's break login forms into two pages so we can annoy all the password manager users - for kicks.

andrewmackrodt• 4 years ago

This annoys me too, but since starting work at a company which uses single sign on, it's started to make sense why certain sites have this pattern, e.g. if your login is an email address and the domain is enrolled to handle sign on outside of the service, you are redirected and the original website doesn't have the ability to capture your password.

For personal use, I find 1Password typically handles multiple screen logins, including 2FA quite well, although requires an extra UI interaction.

1270018080• 4 years ago

They're not going to allow something well designed to be made on the first pass. Sure that would be good for the user and company, but they need to justify their 40hr/week salaried job somehow. It's like planned obsolescence but for work.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

Let's make clickable and non-clickable text the same font, style, and color!

Let's remove all indications that buttons are buttons!

I've actually had to use a site which had all four combinations: static text that looks like static text, static text that looks like a button, buttons that look like static text, and buttons that look like buttons.

egypturnash• 4 years ago

"Less is more" is a religion that is very easy to carry far past the point where less begins being less.

nicoffeine• 4 years ago

I do not understand why designers are so insistent on making tools so difficult and unpleasant to use.

Because they need something to pad their resume. In fact, most of the things that are wrong with software today are for the same reason.

Executives want to make bold changes, so the Start button must be "re-imagined." For the same reason, Product Managers "re-imagine" the menus that have been in place for years and Product Designers "re-imagine" the design language to remove all cues that a button clicks and a panel scrolls.

In my routine trips to the auto parts stores over the past 20 years, I have seen their throughput drop as more and more of these modern ideas seeped in. Their text menus had been the same for decades, with as many options for a next action as there were keys on the keyboard. If my intuition is correct, they were remote sessions to a server/mainframe. How about that for keeping the computation close to the data. Now that has all been replaced with a single button and a cursor.

I'm not a die-hard CLI user by any stretch, but I understand the impulse after watching usability circle the drain year after year. There's a healthy middle somewhere and I am hoping to find it.

mrjin• 4 years ago

If I remember correctly, Chrome started all this BS with the infamous burger menu. With traditional designs, I can easily find what are the operations available and now I have make at least one extra click to discover that. Making it worse, some websites do not implement the menus correctly so when you move your mouse trying to click one of the sub-menus, the pop-out hides automatically as now you have moved away from the burger menu... It was kinda make sense as we used to have very small screens and the screen estate was very tight. But now we have much bigger screens, such trend just gets worse...

sings• 4 years ago

I want to push back on this idea that designers are out to destroy everything.

I think one interesting way to look at these sort of changes is analogous to the introduction of new features in code. In the short term, new features can be added to the existing codebase without the need for much change, but eventually, the overhead becomes problematic and there is the need to make more structural adjustments.

I think it’s similar for designers, who get to the point where new features don’t have a natural home in the existing interface and want to make changes. Just as a junior developer might be tempted to rewrite from scratch, a junior designer might be tempted to introduce a new mental model and rearrange everything. In some cases this may be OK but generally you need a more nuanced approach. The fact that users are the consumers of the change, not designers, is where the analogy falls apart, and thus the need for a more thoughtful introduction of any change.

Obviously the abrupt changes are those that cause a negative reaction, especially when combined with the exaggerated desire to clean up an interface. However, not all change is for changes sake. Sometimes it’s just a case of trying to respond to constraints and make the best compromise when dealing with changing software.

worthless-trash• 4 years ago

You can always push back, but in the general case, reality is showing otherwise.

montag• 4 years ago

Reminds me of when we removed the “Previous Track” button on the Rdio player controls. The data showed that users skipped to previous only a tiny fraction of the time. Lasted about 3 days in production.

Underlying this fallacy is the assumption that usage should somehow be uniformly distributed across all features. In reality, a power law distribution is more natural.

ngc248• 4 years ago

They gotta have something to do ... else how will they justify their salary :)

DocTomoe5• 4 years ago

If a designer doesn't change things, obviously they have achieved peak design, and are now irrelevant and ready to be fired. As long as they move things around, they get a paycheck.

phendrenad2• 4 years ago

It's because we (in the tech world) hire UI designers based on how beautiful their portfolio is, not how usable their design is. "But that's the job of UX!" you say. Yes, but we don't hire UX people. We just hire UI people and expect them to secretly be UX people despite giving every indication to the contrary. Oh well.

mitchdoogle2• 4 years ago

Function is as much a part of design as is aesthetic appeal. A designer who doesn't consider function on the same level as aesthetics is a bad designer.

mitchdoogle2• 4 years ago

Frequency of use seems like a better metric than alphabetical order. The order of the alphabet is arbitrary. Besides, I think this is fairly normal - I just had a look at all the applications I have open now and not one has submenus in alphabetical order

gombosg• 4 years ago

I mapped it to the ctrl key. Very convenient!

popotamonga• 4 years ago

programing for 30+ years and never once used it, just hold shift for the rare cases i need uppercase.

Can it be disabled on windows?

tablespoon4• 4 years ago

programing for 30+ years and never once used it, just hold shift for the rare cases i need uppercase.

The article is not really about the caps lock key.

int_19h7• 4 years ago

https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Map_caps_lock_to_escape_in_Windo...

Keyboard Manager in Microsoft PowerToys is probably the most straightforward.

pessimizer• 4 years ago

Make it into a compose key: https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose

int_19h7• 4 years ago

The link at the end that (I assume) prompted this write-up:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1687635

(Speaking as someone whose native language is non-Latin-based, I think it was a very bad idea. Worse still is their attitude that if some website becomes unusable, "just file a bug".)

tablespoon4• 4 years ago

I think it was a very bad idea. Worse still is their attitude that if some website becomes unusable, "just file a bug".)

Mozilla is run by one of the most inept group of designers, who seem committed to killing off the last non-Chrome browser.

You know what feature they need to remove? Telemetry.

Their telemetry must show that practically zero of their users actually use the collected telemetry, and Mozilla itself can't seem to avoid using the "data" to make bad decisions.

chrisseaton2• 4 years ago

the last non-Chrome browser

Safari is still huge.

fouc• 4 years ago

It's hard not to wonder if the people running Mozilla are being "influenced" to kill the company.

bombcar11• 4 years ago

And lo, finally the day came when the telemetry server sat silent, for no users were using any features, and the Mozilla experiment came to an end.

scrollaway3• 4 years ago

Yeah. This blog post is a work of art. I knew what to suspect when I clicked the BMO link, not surprised unfortunately.

iamevn• 4 years ago

I'm amused that this data-driven design choice has comments restricted. Surely users being frustrated enough to find the relevant bug and provide direct feedback is a strong signal of something.

Edit: On second thought, how can you even attempt to use telemetry to justify feature removal when a sizable portion of your userbase disables telemetry?

MauranKilom• 4 years ago

I'm amused that this data-driven design choice has comments restricted.

If you are up for a second serving of irony, comments for that bug are restricted because someone tried to incite the HN mob onto it a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30379655

kayodelycaon• 4 years ago

Wow. Safari on Mac has this... Chrome hasn't had it for a long time and Firefox removed it.

bombcar11• 4 years ago

Yep, and here's a good test case for it: http://catb.org/jargon/html/M/mojibake.html itself is mojibaked because it's assumed to be UTF-8 and isn't.

lifthrasiir2• 4 years ago

If you dig the whole website (or geminisite, I dunno) you can find a post to which the very same criticism of the OP applies:

https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/36-localized-programming-lan...

We all draw different lines for what feature is not common yet not rare enough to remove, so the context always matters.

For this subject of character encodings, browsers have already reduced their repertoire of suppported encodings for a good chunk of the last decade: the Encoding Standard [1] is substantially smaller than what it used to be (I know because I did implement all of them back then). Some of them (e.g. UTF-7, not exactly "removed" from the Standard because it was never added AFAIK) caused security issues but others (e.g. HZ) didn't and only got removed by the lack of usage. This kind of decision, either for or against, can be only backed with telemetry-like quantification anyway. No criticism in the issue was based on the concrete evidence; Henri Sivonen is right to say that he "can't address remaining non-Latin problems without seeing concrete examples that need addressing".

[1] https://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/

rom1v2• 4 years ago

Around thirty years ago I was a kid with a computer. I learned to program quite a few years before I learned English. I also used DOS without understanding English. I knew what to type to do things, but I didn't know what the words meant. I could start programs, I'd play in QBASIC, write small programs and amusements. To me "PRINT" was the word that made text appear on the screen. I learned years later the word meant something in English.

Wow, this is exactly what happened to me (probably between 8 and 10). I had an old 286 computer, where I learnt BASIC by reading programs already available on the computer.

I wrote programs, but had no idea what the keywords meant. I remember reading out loud "IF … THEN … ELSE" that I pronounced "if … ten … elsse", and my father in the room corrected my pronunciation, "it's if … then … else".

I was very surprised, because he didn't know BASIC at all. "How do you know this?" "It's how we pronounced it in English. It means 'si … alors … sinon'." o_o

It was a revelation to me: the "keywords" I typed in BASIC programs were not just meaningless tokens for the BASIC language, they came from English and had a meaning outside BASIC.

int_19h7• 4 years ago

Addressing the remaining non-Latin problems is extremely easy: just give users the ability to choose an encoding. Or rather, do not remove it.

Note that they are not actually removing any encodings themselves, so the argument from security / attack surface doesn't arise: the website can still send text in any of those encodings (or malformed but autodetected as such). This is purely about UX.

hsivonen3• 4 years ago

Speaking as someone whose native language is non-Latin-based, I think it was a very bad idea.

Bad in principle or bad because you've personally encountered pages where the menu item doesn't work but macOS Safari's submenu does?

smsm42• 4 years ago

The whole attitude of "if your use case is millions of people, we don't care about you" may be excusable for some kind of mega-corporation enjoying a monopoly or near-monopoly in its area. For a project that constantly playing catch up lately, cutting off users may not be the best idea ever. Projects in such position should pay more attention to niche users, because if they lose both niche and mainstream, they will have nothing.

"just file a bug".

It's not just "a bug", it's "a low priority bug" - it's a polite way to say "I couldn't care less".

roywiggins• 4 years ago

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

5424582• 4 years ago

I mean… they did, and called it an iPad. And they’ve sold 350 million of them so far, so it seems like it was a decent idea.

folmar3• 4 years ago

But that was not "revolutionary new", there were tablets previously.

DocTomoe5• 4 years ago

And then they sold the keyboard separately for people who used the ipad as more than a YouTube machine.

zdragnar• 4 years ago

Interestingly, they actually are:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-developing-fol...

I know it is the frequency illusion, but 2022 seems to ve the year that satire keeps coming true.

throitallaway• 4 years ago

This has already existed for a few years in the PC world. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkpad-x1-fold

jptech• 4 years ago

How about Mactini?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BGGOn-H7s3Q

mushyhammer2• 4 years ago

Realistic except for the manual. You're just supposed to find them on your own nowadays.

upwardbound2• 4 years ago

The title is a reference to this story by Harlan Ellison, which won a Hugo award in 1968:

[NSFW - contains graphic descriptions of torture and other severe violence]

https://wjccschools.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/01/I...

NortySpock• 4 years ago

If I recall the story plot points correctly, you should probably have a Not Safe For Work tag on it. (content warnings: sexual assault, murder-suicide, torture)

upwardbound2• 4 years ago

good idea and you're correct. Will do

capableweb• 4 years ago

How can text be NSFW? No one except you would know the actual context and longer story but you, so unless there are words like "PENIS INTO VAGINA" with big letters, I don't see how any plaintext can be NSFW.

pid-1• 4 years ago

The game based on the history (available in GOG) is also pretty decent.

nerdponx• 4 years ago

What is the game called?

Trasmatta2• 4 years ago

This story is one of the reasons I consider the idea of immortality to be terrifying. Never ending life means the possibility of never ending pain.

remram• 4 years ago

You seem to define immortality as "cannot ever die even if you want to" which is not the usual definition. In that case it seems dangerous yes.

dukeofdoom2• 4 years ago

I just saw this video of this poor girl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWjY4Qi8s7o&t=2s

And than read this headline. Enough internet for me today.

ycombinete• 4 years ago

What’s wrong with her?

leokennis• 4 years ago

This video is severely lacking any context - what is going on here?

vanderZwan3• 4 years ago

Here is an audiobook version narrated by Harlan Ellison himself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgo-As552hY

Semaphor2• 4 years ago

An amazing, yet deeply disturbing story.

samschooler• 4 years ago

Relevant bash.org: http://www.bash.org/?835030

tobyhinloopen• 4 years ago

aaa aaaaa a aaa

a aaa aaaaaa aa aaaaaaa aaa aaaaa aaaaaaaaaaa aaa

marginalia_nu6• 4 years ago

Debated linking to <https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/AAAAAAAAA!>

unfocussed_mike• 4 years ago

When there is an applicable uncyclopedia link, there is no debate. You must.

cryptonector4• 4 years ago

Had to check the history. Sad not to see marginalia_nu show up obviously.

the_af• 4 years ago

Computers now instantly boot up when plugged into the wall, and run until the plug is pulled.

So, like my beloved C64 then? I'm all for it.

bombcar11• 4 years ago

This one actually almost works, especially since you can shut down via software (and Apple has almost removed the power button anyway).

jandrese2• 4 years ago

We got some new Dell Laptops at work and they are configured to power on when you open the lid. There is a fingerprint sensor that I think is maybe supposed to be a power button, but it doesn't seem to work as a power button. Twice now the laptops have locked up (black screen, keyboard doesn't light up, etc...) and the old trick of holding the power button down for 10 seconds to hard power it off doesn't work. You have to disassemble the thing and unplug the batteries to get it to power off. Then it powers back on when you plug it back in and open the lid.

clysm2• 4 years ago

There's always a non-software (hardware) fallback for powering off. The option to force a power-off using a multi-second hold is done purely in hardware.

It must always be there for service and safety.

shaky-carrousel• 4 years ago

Ah, looks like Steve and Bob are former Firefox developers.

jsnell• 4 years ago

While it's an amusing story, it feels like the analogue doesn't really work. In reality low value options are removed because few users use it. In the story options (keys) are being removed even when used by absolutely everybody, as long as the relative frequency of the key is low. That's a huge difference.

And of course you don't evaluate an experiment to remove an option like in the story, by looking at before/after rates on how often the option is triggered. It's e.g. pretty clearly not what happened in the the Firefox encoding menu example that motivated the rant.

clysm2• 4 years ago

In reality low value options are removed because few users use it.

Should accessibility options go away as well because few users use it?

The underlying point (even if not conveyed through the best analogy) is that there are critical features that must exist regardless of what telemetry says.

marginalia_nu6• 4 years ago

Honestly this was really just a low effort joke to vent my frustration, not intended to be fair or convincing.

Anyway, the point is more subtle than that. Whether a feature is used is as much a function of the overall design as much as the feature's usefulness. If you hide a feature away or make it awkward to access, then it will see less use. Sometimes an infrequently used feature can aid a more frequently used feature to work more smoothly.

austinl3• 4 years ago

Very similar to A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by M. J. Shields (frequently misattributed to Mark Twain):

"For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld."

thematrixturtle2• 4 years ago

Except that Twain's spelling system would actually be a vast improvement on what we have today.

Semiapies• 4 years ago

Right. It's basically because of the aggressively anti-phonetic nature of English orthography that phonetic spellings look "wrong" or "stupid" to us.

rdiddly• 4 years ago

It shows simultaneously how crazy it currently is, and why it'll never change (at least not on that time scale)!

aaroninsf2• 4 years ago

Setting aside the question of utility (ease of use issues),

English spelling is also a "side channel" which persists information about the word which is lost (recoverable only via lookup) when spelling is normalized.

With things as they are, the etymology of words is often visible in their spelling; this has practical implications such as imparting shades of meaning through allusion, which are one reason English has retained lots of near-synonyms, but not discarded them. This means it allows for a particular kind of nuance.

As a native speaker of English I find the relative paucity of vocabulary confounding (or comical); it is now expected in my (bilingual) household that when where English draws distinctions, Spanish reuses. My German-speaking father in law is always entertaining us with cases where German constructs words through liberal compounding, where English doesn't.

Which is just to say, problems aside, English's maddening spelling almost always encodes useful information. For some uses. (Not tech docs, but more than poetry.)

Interesting footnote to this: English has many "backformations," cases where the spelling of some words has conformed over time to that of similar words from other languages, even when they etymologically unrelated. My favorite example of this is "strawberry" in which the "berry" is a backformation.

Sebastian_09• 4 years ago

Sounds like dutch to me

shynrou• 4 years ago

That's a cool text. It feels like the language switches to old dialect. It reads and probably sounds a lot more like old german or dutch.

cylon13• 4 years ago

It shouldn't sound any different, that's the point of the exercise. The sounds are held constant while the way of writing them down changes.

qalmakka2• 4 years ago

It sounds the same, that's the point. Languages like German and Italian for instance follow the same principle, everything is phonetic, nobody needs to spell anything (heck Italian doesn't even have a world for "spelling"), every letter always sounds the same all the time. Kids learn to read very fast, and you always know how to spell people surnames because they are pronounced "as you write it", with a 1:1 correspondence.

Old and Middle English were like that too, but then the Great Vowel Shift happened and now English still mostly retains the Middle English spelling with apparently random pronounciation rules.

Nobody devises a non-phonetic alphabet, when English adopted the Latin alphabet it was mostly phonetical. The issue is that the written language always moves slower than the spoken one, because written language lasts for longer.

austinl3• 4 years ago

Which reminds me — I was fascinated to learn that the Spelling Bee [1] is mostly an English-speaking thing, since many English words are derived from a variety of languages [2]. There is no such thing as a spelling bee in Germany, for example.

Germany actually enacted an orthographical reform in 1996, where they modified the spelling of certain words to make the language easier to learn. This was remarkable in and of itself, since it involved an international agreement between multiple German-speaking countries. As I've been learning German, it's been a strange and pleasant feeling to hear a long word and then be able to spell it correctly 99% of the time.

Ironically, because of my parent comment above, Mark Twain also has an essay on how much he hated learning German [4] (more due to grammar than spelling, although he was learning it before the reform).

[1] https://spellingbee.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1... [4] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html

marcandre• 4 years ago

It is pretty much a thing in French too, sadly.

dpifke• 4 years ago

I'm a native English speaker, and was thrilled by German's logical spelling when I first started learning the language. But then my German vocabulary began to include borrowed words from French and English, where spelling conventions go out the window.

gumby• 4 years ago

Are you kidding? It’s prime time TV in France.

Languages which spell “phonetically” have to reform their spelling from time to time (and agree on whose pronunciation is authoritative) else the language ends up with the same issues as English and French. TANSTAAFL.

Personally I find the conservative spelling of English and French easier when reading as they often encode meaning which is stripped from “reformed” spelling such as German.

biztos• 4 years ago

I learned German before the reform and I grudgingly admit it’s probably easier to learn it now, but some of the lost bits had aesthetic value and some of the spelling is still maddening. Plus if you actually speak German in any German-speaking place other than (arguably) Hannover you will be using a lot of dialect. And Austria, Switzerland and Germany still have some pretty big differences in the official language, though they’re understandable if you’re fluent in any one, whereas the full-on dialects often are not mutually intelligible even for native speakers. And the there is the Denglish phenomenon especially in Berlin.

Hungarian spelling is super easy by comparison, but then the rest of Hungarian is not.

sandworm101• 4 years ago

It also a very american thing. At the top levels it isnt even about language and learning rules for spelling words. Rather it is pure memorization mascarading as knowledge. Success in the final rounds is determined by whether or not you have memorized a paticular word. None of the kids in the finals actually deduce a spelling from rules. Memorizing more words helps, but in the end it is just a numbers game. Many champions compile thier own lists of likely words based on previous competions,

And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english. The oxford is far to large for any child to memorize.

lordnacho• 4 years ago

My language teacher in high school told me he kept in with spelling tests in French but stopped in German because after a while nobody gets anything wrong. Have to agree, it's far far easier to spell stuff in German. I could do it after a short time living in Switzerland.

DocTomoe5• 4 years ago

Germany actually enacted an orthographical reform in 1996

That reform has since been reformed twice itself, and major newspapers have started to enforce their own orthography to fight the chaos that was caused by these "improvements". Most people my age (40-something) and socioculutal strata have ignored the reform altogether and keep using the old, "correct" forms. And the kids may learn the "easier" form at first, but once they get immersed with books and the news, switch to weird variants somewhere between old-school and new-school German orthography, with a heavy bias to old-school.

amyjess• 4 years ago

On the other hand, you also have languages like Danish where the pronunciation is just as messy as English.

raverbashing• 4 years ago

since it involved an international agreement between multiple German-speaking countries

You mean Austria and Switzerland. Their neighbours?

I might argue it was not so hard. Especially since Switzerland doesn't use ß

WalterBright• 4 years ago

Germany seems to have gotten rid of sütterlin as well. None of my German friends can decipher it. I figure on using it for communicating with my U-Boot fleet, nobody will know what my commands are! HAHAHHAHHAHHAAAA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin#/media/File:S%C...

Detecting cat pictures is nothing compared to deciphering sütterlin. Even Unicode has rejected it, despite accepting useless text like Linear A.

me_me_me• 4 years ago

Polish is quite similar, in a sense that if you hear a word you can write it down.

However we have some letters that - while phonetically the same - are used in different cases.

'u' and 'ó', or 'rz' and 'ż', or 'h' and 'ch'

Those are largely result of a Slavic country adapting Latin alphabet and over millennia trying to reconcile the two (clashing systems). The notations and pronunciations evolved slowly over the years and aforementioned are the remaining artifacts of the past.

In primary and secondary schools you'd get orthography test when teachers dictates some silly story riddled with unusual, rare trap words where you 'guess' those interchangeable letters.

(gżegżółka, or maybe: gżegrzółka, grzegżółka, grzegrzułka...)

There was a push for a similar reform to sort this out but went nowhere. Partially due to tradition and partially that there would be clashes like

'może' - maybe, 'morze' - sea

Both are pronounced the same, so if you drop 'rz' both words would have the same spelling.

NikolaNovak2• 4 years ago

In some countries there's no such thing as Spelling Bee as there is no such activity as spelling (or even a word for it). When I was a kid, if somebody didn't hear you well over the phone, you might repeat the name or word slower or louder. But if somebody heard you well, even if it's a brand new word or name, they can write it.

There was only one way to write down a heard word, and only one way to read a written word (minus possibly intonation/accents that cannot be captured either way). So while I disagree with some of the specific choices in the joke story (and they possibly inadvertently have some deal breaking inconsistencies, especially around the reformed i) dear gawd yes, we can simplify this nightmare that English calls spelling :O

alsetmusic• 4 years ago

There was a fantastic interview with the author of a book on the history of the English language and how / why it’s so messed up. I bought the author’s book based on the ep, but haven’t got to it yet as I’ve acquired many more books throughout the pan.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/corpse-corps-horse-an...

samus• 4 years ago

The German spelling reform had mixed results though. The new reform was universally accepted only by governments and schools. Various publishers have house standards and the rules were amended and partly rolled back a few times. Many polls in Germany show widespread rejection by the wider population. At least we got rid of the long "s" (one of the complaints of Mark Twain) long ago.

dddddaviddddd• 4 years ago

At that point we may as well just write in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

HKH2• 4 years ago

And have everyone write in their own accent?

teddyh2• 4 years ago

Sorry, not Mark Twain. It was written in 1971 by M. J. Shields¹. It has since been frequently mis-attributed to Mark Twain, who only wrote about a similar topic in 1899².

1. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz....

2. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/what_is_man/chap...

austinl3• 4 years ago

Ah, another quote misattributed to Twain. Looks like it was submitted as a letter to The Economist in 1971 — I'll update the parent. Thanks for pointing this out!

gadiyar• 4 years ago

Looks like both of these are dead links (at least for me).

tkgally• 4 years ago

Serious proposals for the reform of English spelling were all the rage more than a century ago. Examples at the Internet Archive:

Comstock's phonetic magazine (1846)

https://archive.org/details/comstocksphoneti00unse

Biografiz ov de prezidents ov de Yunited Stats, kompild bi F.G. Adamz (1856)

https://archive.org/details/biografizovdepre00adam

A system of phonetic spelling, adapted to English (1889)

https://archive.org/details/systemofphonetic00call

The fonetic primer, offering the universal alfabet and the science of spelling (c1907)

https://archive.org/details/foneticprimeroff00storrich

More here:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Spelling+r...

It’s interesting to think about why the proposals for English failed while orthographic reforms in some other languages—Russian, German, Japanese, Chinese—succeeded, at least partially.

potiuper• 4 years ago

The last time English had a central language authority, i.e. l'Academie Francaise, was when words were first transcribed in Old English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qT8ZYewYEY

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

andai• 4 years ago

Thanks for sharing these. I am a fan of Quikscript, which was specifically designed to be written by hand.

Here is the original Quikscript Manual:

https://www.quikscript.net/quikscript-manual.pdf

Quikscript evolved from Shavian:

[George Bernard] Shaw placed in his will provisions instructing his executor to organize a world-wide competition to design an improved English alphabet. A British designer, Ronald Kingsley Read, who had corresponded extensively with Shaw for several years regarding just such an alphabet, was selected along with three other finalists as the winners of the competition. Read was chosen to design the final form of the alphabet. The "Shaw Alphabet" or "Shavian", as it is now generally known, was the result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript

majewsky2• 4 years ago

The late 1800s and early 1900s were also the peak of constructed-language movements like Esperanto and Volapük, which were riding on the assumption that there would be peace in our time if only we would all speak the same language and thereby see eye to eye.

Also somewhat related, in the same timeframe, Japan was opening itself up after nearly three centuries of isolation and catching up with technological development. While new loanwords flooded into the language from all kinds of European languages, some scholars argued for replacing the traditional Japanese writing system with the Latin alphabet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#As_a_...

The proposal never won any majority support, but the government did end up doing a smaller reform: After WW2, several character forms were simplified and an official list of characters in common use with standardized pronounciations was published by the government as a baseline for the school syllabus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji

KineticLensman• 4 years ago

It’s interesting to think about why the proposals for English failed

I think one reason is that phonetic spellings wouldn't work with some regional dialects. Consider 'bath' - many southern English people pronounce it as if it had an 'r'.

justnotworthit• 4 years ago

Why would you change y to i, and keep i for 3 different sounds? (consonant y; ipa i; and short i).

memsom2• 4 years ago

The consonant sound is just i really. You think it is different because you tend to run the sounds together, but it is really just a clipped i.

dripton• 4 years ago

Text artifacts in the Infocom text adventures Planetfall and Stationfall use this system. Play the games long enough and you get pretty good at reading them.

JuettnerDistrib• 4 years ago

If you know German, there is an entire book written in this style, introducing a simplifying spelling and grammar each chapter [1]. It is called "fom winde ferfeelt", a pun on "Gone with the wind" turned into "Missed by the wind". Highly recommend.

[1] http://www.zedorock.net/winde.html

eezurr• 4 years ago

Ahh. I see you have learned Japanese. Well done!

(Note: Japanese uses a phonetic alphabet. For the most part, the characters you see (when kanji is written out in hiragana/katakana) are sounded exactly as they are in when written/spoken individually/independently. There are some dialects though that modify this, notably Tokyo's replacing "su" with "s" and other changes)

Dylan16807• 4 years ago

Not until japan learns how to put consonants next to each other.

jquery2• 4 years ago

Isn’t there a ton of drift, though? Yes, spelling in Japanese is easier than English, but listening and speaking exercises seem just as important if not more important than they are for English. Otherwise you’ll sound like a cat got your tongue and the person you’re speaking to will reply with にゃんですか？

dilawar• 4 years ago

In India, we call it Hinglish.

aidenn04• 4 years ago

Except unlike TFA, the orthographic reform suggested by Shields actually makes things easier in the mid-term (long term, pronunciation will drift from spelling again)

vander_elst2• 4 years ago

I actually don't mind the last form, it's much more unambiguous than the first one. Many languages already adopt 1 letter 1 sound. It's English that is highly irregular (https://books.google.com/books/about/Highly_Irregular.html?i...).

tsimionescu11• 4 years ago

I don't think there is any language that actually adopts a 1:1 mapping of letters to sounds, but many come very close to adopting a 1:1 mapping between groups of letters and groups of sounds (for a particular accent).

For example, Romanian is a pretty phonetic langauge, and it adds 4 letters/diacritics to the latin alphabet to come closer - ă [uh], î (no equivalent in English), ș [sh], and ț (like [zz] in pizza).

Even so, it also has some letter combinations - ce sound like the [chai] in "chair", ci sounds like the [Chi] in "China"; but c in any other place represens a hard [k] sound. To mark a hard [k] before e or i, you then use che,chi (why they didnt do it the other way around is beyond me, since [ca],[cu],[co],[că],[cî] all spell the same [c] sound as [che], [chi]).

The same rules apply to g - ghi sounds like the [gea] in gear, while gi sounds like the [gi] in gin.

X of course represents [ks], but can also reprezent [gz] in certain words, such as examen (exam).

I is normally a particular vowel or semivowel sound, like [ee] in English. However, in word final positions after a consonant, it's usually a consonantic sound. For example, the word "mări" (seas) is pronounced as a single syllable, with just a short [ee] sound at the end. However, the word "{a} mări" ({to} enlarge) is pronounced in two syllables, [muh-ree], accenting the second syllable.

The personal pronouns I, he, and she (eu, el, ea) are all written with an e at the start, but always pronounced with an extra [ee] sound. The phonetic spelling would have been ieu, iel, iea but for whatever reason this was not done. No other words share this feature in the standard accent, though it happens to many/all words starting with the letter e- in other accents.

As with many other languages, borrowed words tend to preserve the original spelling, even after they settle on a Romanian pronunciation. For example, the word "weekend" is written exactly like this, not the Romanian phonetic spelling "uichend". Older borrows do get this treatment though. For example the French "chaise longue", a reclining chair, was borrowed into Romanian a long time ago and is now spelled "șezlong".

protontorpedo• 4 years ago

Curiously, this last sentence matches almost exactly how a Portuguese speaker would write English phonetically.

Cthulhu_4• 4 years ago

It's not without precedent either; due to printing presses, the English alphabet lost the letters Eth (ð), Thorn (þ), Wynn (ƿ), Yogh (ȝ), Ash (æ) and Ethel (œ), to be replaced with phonetically similar letters (like th) or just sort-of-similar-looking replacements (ð replaced by y, as in "ye olde", which is pronounced "the old", or ȝ replaced by z like in "Cockenzie", pronounced "Cockennie" or "Dalziel" pronounced "Deeyel").

memsom2• 4 years ago

the Y in "Ye Olde" is actually thorn. If you look at thorn, you can see how it happened - the loop was unlooped.

Also - English was never consistent. The thorn/eth split was completely random and was down more to style than correctness. Modern spelling of Old English has standardised the spelling. But macrons and dots over g's and c's also never existed, but are common in modern spelling for OE.

singularity2001• 4 years ago

It's not kohirnt when kohirnt rhymes with burned. You need the e in kohirent.

You can't resolve the vowel distribution by remapping it, so keep some vouwels in the woerld…

Otherwise look good / ok'ish to me. (no /s)

I really like the gud trend by streamers to overpronounce words so they match their spelling again, e.g. say of-ten for often etc.

soco• 4 years ago

Heeey year 1 got rid of "x" already, why's it all over the place in the final line???

avgcorrection3• 4 years ago

The second paragraph is just as legible as normal English.

abandonliberty• 4 years ago

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

garfieldnate• 4 years ago

I like historical spellings because they tell the story of the development of the language; even though it can be pretty chaotic and tough to master, the chaos itself has a certain charm (for me) in demonstrating how how one of our oldest technologies lives and evolves in the minds of the human beings that use it.

Besides that, though, I don't like the Shields proposal because it's specific to his dialect. No "r" in "letez" and using an "a" in "jast" for instance makes this difficult for me to read.

perihelions2• 4 years ago

Does anyone actually use CapsLock (the functionality*), and if so what for?

*(Not counting remapping the physical button to some other, useful, function).

marginalia_nu6• 4 years ago

Honestly, the key wouldn't even be in the story if it wasn't to allude to "I have no mouth..."

perihelions2• 4 years ago

Oh, I just got the joke.

xiaomai• 4 years ago

I swap esc and caps lock, but i use the escape key (for caps-lock) every single day. anytime i'm needing to type a const like REALLY_LONG_VARIABLE.

cryptonector4• 4 years ago

All upper-case and underscores? Sticky keys is for you! Shift-lock >> capslock.

chrismorgan2• 4 years ago

Why not just hold down one of the Shift keys while typing? That should be faster, considerably once underscores are involved, requiring only slight adjustments to typing technique, to use a ring finger where you would normally use a pinky.

(This is a genuine question, because I’m confused why one wouldn’t do it that way—I think it probably never even occurred to me to use Caps Lock for such a purpose, given that the modeless Shift key was right there.)

Czarcasm• 4 years ago

I'm a mechanical engineer, and ASME Y14.5 (the leading drafting standard in the west) requires the use of all capitol letters for technical drawings. Because of this, I use the CapsLock key very very frequently.

Removing the CapsLock key would piss off a lot of people in the hardware engineering world.

chrismorgan2• 4 years ago

If lowercase letters aren’t permitted at all, then surely your technical drawing app would just shift everything to uppercase automatically (or at least provide an option to do so)?

cryptonector4• 4 years ago

If you work with Kerberos, you might. Kerberos realm names are DNS-like, but up-cased. So the realm for news.ycombinator.com might be NEWS.YCOMBINATOR.COM or YCOMBINATOR.COM.

Normally I would just lock shift (sticky keys rock), but '.' happens in realm names, and shifting it isn't useful, so I use capslock for that.

That's about the only time I use capslock. Otherwise it's sticky keys all the way.

roryokane2• 4 years ago

I use Caps Lock for typing any acronym of four or more letters, and for typing some three-letter acronyms. Examples:

“Execute this SQL against the ‘XYZ_DB’ PostgreSQL database.”

“When I requested the HTML file over HTTP, I saw a CAPTCHA.”

probably_wrong2• 4 years ago

I do. I typically have plenty of constants with descriptive names, and typing DESCRIPTIVE_NAME with a single hand is annoying.

As a side note I noticed that some keyboards implement CapsLock wrong: when CapsLock is on, pressing "9" should generate "9" and not ")". Otherwise it would be called ShiftLock, which is a lot less useful.

klez3• 4 years ago

What keyboard is that, so I know to NEVER buy it?

IYasha3• 4 years ago

Not as often as Shift, but yes, I use it for its purpose.

cercatrova• 4 years ago

That's funny because I remap caps lock to esc, primarily for vim but also because caps lock is just never used in my experience.

petepete2• 4 years ago

I use a HHKB mainly because it has a correctly positioned control key. I wish other companies would make them this way too - caps lock just isn't useful.

cole-k• 4 years ago

Genuine question: have you had problems with software remapping before?

I discovered the joys of control-in-place-of-caps-lock when I bought an HHKB, but I got it because I liked it as a keyboard. Since then I've had no trouble converting caps-lock into control with other keyboards.

If you don't mind an unrelated anecdote, while I got used to the diamond-shaped arrow keys of the HHKB, I kind of wish they would have been hjkl or just on the keyboard itself. I find that I still need to use arrow keys too much for that layout to be comfortable.

murrayb• 4 years ago

I just disable it, I don't touch type particularly well and hitting it by accident never gives me what I want!

RheingoldRiver• 4 years ago

Try Ctrl! It's much easier to reach than the normal ctrl key. If you're on Windows, RandyRants' SharpKeys is a great utility to do the registry edits for you.

anthony_romeo• 4 years ago

I replaced Caps Lock with the Compose Key (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key) and now I feel like a wizard when I type.

niek_pas3• 4 years ago

Non-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

temp8964• 4 years ago

I never use caps lock and I wish it can be removed.

Was typing of upcase a common thing in the past? So common make it warranted a key for just that? I have no idea.

II2II• 4 years ago

The use of upper case used to be much more common. Many forms were filled out in upper case, even in the days of typewriters. When writing, upper case was used to add emphasis. The use of upper case was also common while programming.

I suppose the development of the capslock key has more to do with much older typewriters. Mechanical typewriters took a fair amount of effort to use.

muixoozie• 4 years ago

If your adventurous, you could get a keyboard that supports qmk or zmk open source firmware and gain full control over what your keys do. I don't have caps lock bound.

arglebargle123• 4 years ago

I started mapping caps to super after a stint daily-driving a chromebook a few years ago and it's stuck with me. I'm surprised none of the major vendors besides big G have thought to repurpose caps for something more useful.

techolic• 4 years ago

I should do that. I'm too ashamed to count how many times a mistakenly on caps lock has screwed vim up for me.

therealdrag0• 4 years ago

I’ve always done CTRL on windows abs CMD on Mac. Much more ergonomic for pinky.

blululu2• 4 years ago

Personally I strongly recommend replacing caps lock with control on a Mac keyboard for better tabbed browsing shortcuts. The hot keys for move one tab left/right are Tab + Control and Tab + Control + Shift. If you replace caps lock with control then all these keys form a nice large column of keys at the far left end of the keyboard.

vymague• 4 years ago

It reminds me every time I asked why a website does a weird thing, the answer was always be "we have done A/B testing".

bombcar11• 4 years ago

I recall reading somewhere that basically everyone does A/B testing absolutely wrong, which means it ends up being "coincidentally" always picking what the team wanted to pick anyway.

dredmorbius2• 4 years ago

Data driven design: stack-rank for features.

cryptonector4• 4 years ago

So... blame Ballmer, yes?

dredmorbius2• 4 years ago

Not sure where the idea originated. It's just ... deeply flawed.

(Both SR and DDD.)

pezezin• 4 years ago

If I could remove a key from a full keyboard, it would be Num lock. Why does it exist? I can't think of any situation where you have a full num pad and don't want to use it.

8ytecoder2• 4 years ago

Haven't used it in a really really long time but I used to disable num lock and use it as arrow keys for games.

makeitdouble2• 4 years ago

I’m pretty happy we kept a ton of “dead” keys as they offer a flurry of options for more modifiers and shortcuts. The same way most people probably only use one of the Shift key, one of the Cmd key, etc. but it would be a shame to remove them. I’d see Num lock under the same light.

I went with Apple’s “international” layout just to have more keys to map.

ordu• 4 years ago

I use it to check does OS kernel respond to a keyboard. When kernel is dead LED wouldn't switch state. I cannot use CapsLock, because I have no, I remapped it to a compose. I cannot use ScrollLock LED, because it reflects a chosen keyboard layout, and I believe it needs more than just healthy kernel to switch LED. But I never messed with NumLock, because I see no reason.

I'd remove Insert key. I regularly hit it by accident and I see no reason for insert-mode to exist except to annoy me.

itisit• 4 years ago

My left pinky has been most grateful that I mapped my caps lock key to ctrl many, many years ago.

silverpepsi2• 4 years ago

In my opinion this was already done with the nightmare that have been the function keys in laptops for three decades

I use F2 and F6 and screen contrast buttons every single day. And the FN lock is used just infrequently enough that there is ZERO possiblity I will remember its state at any given moment, especially considering reboots or sleeps that may toggle it. And I use it just enough that it isn't worth spending 5 seconds to move my hands away to figure out its state, consequently every single time I hit an FN key I get an undesired result from pressing it. For the love of god we are talking about adding 12 keys to the keyboard, they can be half-height, or simply making the FN lock into a shift function with no lock capability to GUARANTEE determinist results when pressing a key and the lock is in an unknown state. Can we please start a petition.

Tijdreiziger3• 4 years ago

I had to look up 'Fn lock' -- apparently you can hit Fn + Esc on some laptops to 'lock' the Fn function on?

I've honestly never used this in my life. Can't your problem be solved by simply never engaging the Fn lock?

dalmo3• 4 years ago

Some keyboards, like the Microsoft Sculpt which I use, have no Fn key, only Fn lock. I just gave up using the media keys at all.

thriftwy• 4 years ago

Здравствуйте, Мартин Алексеевич!

unnouinceput• 4 years ago

This reminds me of those AI's at Facebook? who did exactly this before they were plugged off. I've read about it right here on HN circa a year or so.

tpoacher• 4 years ago

That link to Symptomless Coma though ... yikes. Way to put the article starkly into perspective.

(PS. I read this in gemini. Thank you!)

marginalia_nu6• 4 years ago

Jam is very dark, but also undeniably brilliant.

Findecanor• 4 years ago

It get scary when you consider how many non-UI decisions there have been out in the real world that have been caused by the same kind of thinking.

makeitdouble2• 4 years ago

TBF things come and go. Imagine a world where nothing ever disappears whatever the usage patterns are.

Would you wish for you gas car engine to have kept a cranking port, as after all the battery could die and it’s more options that plugging a booster, right ?

bombcar11• 4 years ago

Amusingly in reference to the original discussion, see catb's glossary: http://catb.org/jargon/html/M/mojibake.html

On Safari this is mangled until I force the encoding to Western (ISO Latin 1) - Chrome and Firefox leave it as is.

alecbz2• 4 years ago

Something something slippery slope.

I mean look, if you believe in abstractions at all, then sometimes (or always) interfaces need to hide things. Interfaces can be made too small for sure, but without a more principled argument on why any particular change is going too far, it seems way too easy to say "oh no someone made an interface smaller, the end is nigh!"

Though to be fair I guess the author's point is maybe that the arguments in the bug report are also insufficient if they could also be used to remove critical components. I'm not sure how much I agree with that, but I only glanced at the actual bug report.

emeraldd• 4 years ago

The answer should have been morse.

frob• 4 years ago

To be fair, I banished capslock from my keyboard in favor of ctrl 17 years ago and haven't looked back.

fargle• 4 years ago

awesome article! I still remember switching back and forth from sun (and other unix) keyboards - ctrl and caps lock are reversed from today's standard 104.

I haven't used the caps-lock since then. Pinky just goes on the shift key TO TYPE ALL SHOUTY. I don't really know if pinky ever gets used fro letters in any case, but I think he doesn't so unless you need capital ctrl- something what's the problem?

Still it does also feel like the problem of designers that like to use the tail to wag the dog to justify yet another unnecessary change is just all too realistic.

sidpatil• 4 years ago

You might enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

roryokane2• 4 years ago

This is a link to the video “Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard”, which was already linked in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30421855

sam0x17• 4 years ago

I usually surgically disable my CAPS lock in registry or firmware settings -- most annoying mis-click ever for me -- I just hold down shift if I need to

suzzer993• 4 years ago

I always did the same with the Insert key on windows. Totally useless and misclick hell.

Nition• 4 years ago

The Alcatel One Touch Max DB[0] could receive SMS messages in upper and lowercase, but could only send in uppercase. I read through the whole manual at the time and there was nothing about it. Fond memories of always seeming like I was shouting at people in replies.

[0]https://www.gsmarena.com/alcatel_ot_max_db-27.php

block_dagger• 4 years ago

Nice Harlan Ellison reference

smoyer• 4 years ago

I type on ErgoDox Infinity keyboards and I don't have a caps-lock. It was a bit irritating so I switched from Java to Go to avoid capitalized constants and I'm happy again!

michaelsalim• 4 years ago

I see some comments of remapping the caps lock into ctrl. Not much benefit IMO. I'd recommend to trying out backspace instead.

Why? It removes the need to move your right hand off the mouse if you need to delete anything.

For example: double click a word and backspace with left hand. Especially handy for programming. Definitely one i can't live without now.

wy352• 4 years ago

And statistically, backspace is the second most used key (after the spacebar). I don’t understand why people remap caps-lock to control when it’s much closer to the hand than backspace and it’s much, MUCH less frequently used.

shanth• 4 years ago

because position of ctrl on Apple keyboards are in much weirdo position than Backspace that remap caps-lock to ctrl is less painful ?

Phrodo_003• 4 years ago

People building custom keyboards do choose to remove some keys. Here are some examples:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/sxaxe0...

https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/sf5hot...

https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/sb5jf4...

Stevvo• 4 years ago

They look to closer to artwork than practical input devices. I doubt they get much use.

xboxnolifes2• 4 years ago

The examples given are pretty extreme (except the first one), but 40% and 60% keyboard are common for keyboard enthusiasts.

blululu2• 4 years ago

This is cute but it refuses to actually think about the problem of keyboard layout design. Take the reductio the other way and you end up adding keys to create a keyboard with a key for “the” and one for “and”, “or”, “but”, “of”... The author is just saying they want the QWERTY keyboard exactly as it is without actually thinking how this layout got there in the first place.

The Caps Lock key makes no sense in the context of a computer keyboard. Back in the days of typewriters when everything was a single monospaced font, typing in all caps was the only way to make something bold (there weren’t italics, bold, font sizes or different fonts). Having a convenient way to hold down the shift key was nice in this context. In the context of a computer keyboard that has multiple fonts, sizes and weights, it is a dumb key. Larry Tesler’s dictum “no modes” is immediately applicable. Steve Jobs tried to get rid of the caps lock key twice (once at Apple and once at Next). Google’s pixel books have replaced it with a search shortcut, which is not that useful but much better than having a key whose primary function is to mess up password entry and shout online without any extra effort for shouting. On a Mac keyboard there are a few common substitutions for caps lock that you can use. Any of these substitutions are preferable (I have it as Option for tab navigation but any of the other main hot keys make a better use of keyboard real estate).

MetaWhirledPeas2• 4 years ago

Caps lock is a dumb key. Left shift + right shift should put you into the mode, then any press of shift should take you out of it.

xboxnolifes2• 4 years ago

I disagree. It is useful to maintain caps lock for typing but allow shift presses for keybind combinations. Having to re-enter caps lock after every shift combination would be annoying

bee_rider4• 4 years ago

The idea of somebody slamming down both shift keys before getting into an internet yelling match is pretty hilarious. I think both caps lock and this ULTIMATE SHIFT idea are probably both not necessary, but I have to thank you for putting the funny image in my head.

drran2• 4 years ago

«Caps Lock» key should be renamed to just «Lock». Lock+Shift will behave as Caps Lock, Lock+Tab may behave as Enable Automatic Autocompletion, Lock+Alt may behave as switch to alternate alphabet, etc.

aidenn04• 4 years ago

You could do bold on an electric by over-striking with the same letters; with manuals you could over-strike while hitting the keys harder.

_0w8t6• 4 years ago

Given that even Apple not only keeps the Caps key, but also has it traditionally big, I suppose the market demands it. But then who are those people who uses it?

thinkling• 4 years ago

Some of us use it a lot because we remap it to be the meta key. grin

d21d3q• 4 years ago

I met two persons who were using caps lock instead of shift during regular typing - for each capital letter: CL, some letter, CL.

klez3• 4 years ago

I use caps lock very often, because when touch-typing it's A LOT EASIER than keeping changing the finger I use to press Shift on the correct side of the keyboard.

And if you think "well, just keep shift pressed and use another finger to type what you would have typed with your pinky" it just means you're either not touch typing or doing it "wrong" :) There's a reason there are two shift keys on a keyboard, yet I rarely hear people complaining about this but plenty complain about the "useless" caps lock.

TL;DR: you can pry caps lock from my cold dead hands. I need it.

(ETA: maybe I should just remap double-shift to caps and be done with it, but that's just one more thing I have to learn and one more configuration I need to do on a new machine).

grishka• 4 years ago

typing in all caps was the only way to make something bold

Thinking of it, with modern messaging apps that support text formatting, it would be useful to have dedicated caps-lock-style keys for bold, italic, monospace, etc.

tsimionescu11• 4 years ago

CapsLock is extremely useful in programming, where CONSTANT_NAME is the most common convention for names of constants.

masklinn4• 4 years ago

Writing out constant names is a minor and rare event (even more so with any editor featuring autocompletion). This does not come close to “useful”, let alone extremely so.

The value of capslock is that it provides an essentially blank key which can be remapped to something useful e.g. Ctrl, Esc, Meta, …

electroly3• 4 years ago

Holding down shift is not really a problem for constant names since you need it for the underscores anyway. You can type CONSTANT_NAME without lifting the shift key but with caps lock you still need to use shift anyway.

bdowling• 4 years ago

Or in vim you type `constant_name`, followed by `Esc gUb`. ('g' go, 'U' uppercase, 'b' back one word.)

wizardofdos2• 4 years ago

As common as it is wrong.

Why is the constant screaming at me? Why is the fact that it's a constant important enough to be encoded in the styling of the letters, but not important enough to be encoded in the name. Why isn't the IDE or the compiler keeping track of the constantness of the variable and reminding me to not do the wrong thing? If they can and are, why am I not trusting them? And if they can't, why am I writing in a language that doesn't even have JavaScript levels of a type system?

vander_elst2• 4 years ago

The caps lock key as a key is essential, once remapped to something else. As a vim user, once remapped to Esc, everything makes much more sense, as your keyboard gets closer to the original keyboard on top of which vi was created https://images.app.goo.gl/wZkyxFosFF4jCRCJ8

ntr--2• 4 years ago

fascinating!

i always wondered why soft-BOL is set to such a difficult key to press (^) when it's such a useful movement.

Cthulhu_4• 4 years ago

But it's not necessarily a caps lock key, but an extra function key more easily accessible. There's quite a few keyboard designs out there that have button clusters for thumbs, so that you can use your thumbs for more than just pressing space.

aasasd2• 4 years ago

In the same vein: I discovered the pleasure of the major modifier being under the thumb on MacOS, triply astounding on the MS Natural 4000 keyboard with its huge alt keys (they map to ‘command’ on Mac due to the position). And then I learned that Emacs was made for keyboards where the ‘control’ keys are under the thumbs.

maximus-decimus• 4 years ago

I have an Ergodox EZ keyboard (which is programmable using QMK, or Oryx which is a wrapper around QMK) and I set caps lock to esc on tap but ctrl on hold.

QMK supports as much as 4 different behaviors per key: - tap - hold - tap-hold - double tap

And you can also set keys to change the layer each with their own behavior for caps lock.

cerved2• 4 years ago

Caps lock? oh, you mean ctrl!

DocTomoe5• 4 years ago

The Caps Lock key makes no sense in the context of a computer keyboard.

Remapped to <Compose>, the Caps-Lock key is essential for someone who writes in many different languages. Removing it would not make me very happy.

That being said: I'd love someone to build a modern, USB/Bluetooth-enabled variant of the old Space-Cadet keyboard [1]. Would pay good money for it, too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard

grujicd3• 4 years ago

I'm sure many users don't use Home/End/PgUp/PgDown, since these keys are the first to go on majority of nowadays laptops. Even if there is plenty of space. And yet, I use these keys all the time. When I'm considering a laptop that's the first thing I check. Am I in a tiny minority?

IYasha3• 4 years ago

I had really hard time choosing laptop based on availability of those keys!! I really don't know how those thin mac users live... wait, isn't this (once again) one of those Apple's "minimalism" trends? I think so.

0x004C• 4 years ago

I remember using a laptop with Home/End/PgUp/PgDown on Fn + arrow keys. Using those felt very natural. I wish it was more common so I could have the same on my desktop keyboard.

pipe01• 4 years ago

I use them too, they're really useful for programming and general text editing.

Liskni_si• 4 years ago

Yes, we are a tiny minority. I refuse to compromise on this, and still use a ThinkPad with a 7-row keyboard, but most people have just given up already and went with the mainstream crap. :-(

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

There's Esc. I lost count of how many times I looked at a laptop or a mobile keyboard and got baffled because Esc, a very standard key with no replacement, wasn't there.

Also, the right Alt and Ctrl are quick to go. But somehow there are always buttons for the windows and pop-up keys.

Some laptops manufacturers on my country also think it's a good idea to remove the forward slash and quotation mark. That's because it's the 105° key, and they can't reuse the US 104 keys standard they got from abroad, but well, somehow they think it's not a problem at all.

On the other direction, it's a good thing that desktop keyboards stopped including a "power my computer down" button where most keyboards have delete.

Some people can not understand how standards bring value.

jbuhbjlnjbn• 4 years ago

I have no del key and I must scream (apple keyboard)

aidenn04• 4 years ago

I haven't used a Mac for a while, but, IIRC, one of the modifier keys (Fn, Cmd, Opt?) turns the "delete" key into an actual delete.

dmart• 4 years ago

Fn-delete, yes. Honestly I find this nicer than using a separate key (which also exists on the larger Apple keyboards with numpads), but to each their own.

suzzer993• 4 years ago

Funny you should mention that in this thread. You can map caps lock to forward delete. Trust me it will change your life.

IncRnd• 4 years ago

Well... All of my keyboards have their capslocks keys remapped as escape. There literally hasn't been a capslock key on any of my keyboards for years. This has been a great boon to how I type.

Originally, I remapped the keys this way due to my macbook's touchbar that removed a functional escape key. The frequency is far higher for me to use escape than capslock, which I realized that I actually never used. When I need capitalization, I use the shift key.

suzzer993• 4 years ago

I re-mapped caps lock to forward delete on my Mac. Changed my life.

lasercat• 4 years ago

If you enjoyed reading this, you may also appreciate the novel Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. As letters are banned in the story, they also are omitted in subsequent chapters.

mmmBacon• 4 years ago

Honestly why does a foldable display seem like a good idea? It’s not. It’s crap. If you have any understanding of hardware whatsoever you’ll be able to devine why a foldable screen is going to fail in about 5 seconds and therefore is a bad idea.

On the face of it, foldable screens seem awesome. Like the future. Only problem is that they are still the future.

selcuka• 4 years ago

Computers now instantly boot up when plugged into the wall, and run until the plug is pulled. No more start-up time, the cases are aesthetically cleaner, and manufacturing cost is down at least a fraction of a dollar.

This is not futuristic, but actually retro. Some older computers (i.e. Sinclair ZX Spectrum) didn't have a power button at all.

deathanatos• 4 years ago

Caps Lock is a genuinely useless key: two-shift caps lock is a feature (on some OSes) whereby hitting both shifts toggles caps lock. You can free up that keycap for a brighter future, but still have your caps-lock functionality for when you need to scream at some identifiers.

bullen2• 4 years ago

I discovered that if you limit yourself to a-z and 1-6 you can put 6 letter usernames into an 32-bit integer with 2 bits to spare.

And that gives you 1 billion combinations, sure most of them are garbage but still.

http://fuse.rupy.se uses it to test it...

bullen2• 4 years ago

I call this base-32 and it uses 5-bit. I'm considering using it for my distriuted DNS 2.0...

6-bit would only give you 5 character names but with 0-9 and A-Z if you wished (although that is really confusing for names...)

rusanu• 4 years ago

This article describes perfectly the Netflix catalog...

IYasha3• 4 years ago

I have no words and I must comment.

ringer• 4 years ago

The perfect keyboard already exists[1] and it also has a caps lock key[2].

[1] https://github.com/dkter/aaaaa [2] https://github.com/dkter/aaaaa/pull/13

ncmncm• 4 years ago

Unfortunate title. I would be much happier if the capslock didn't. I have never, ever wanted to use capslock, and on e.g. livecds it is a big nuisance to need to fix it (CapsLock -> Ctrl) on every boot-up.

I curse the person who put the by-far least useful function on one of the most accessible keys, and bunged Ctrl down where it is out of easy reach. A pox on them!

hooby• 4 years ago

Now I want a T-Shirt with "I have no capslock and I must scream!" written on it!

myfonj• 4 years ago

Obligatory "Chicken" strip from The Parking Lot is Full (PLIF), 1996-03-15 [0]

[0] http://j.aufbix.org/plif/archive/wc072.gif

eterevsky• 4 years ago

I have no capslock and I must type a constant name IN_ALL_CAPS.

trasz• 4 years ago

That's why one of the fundamental tenets of Open Source is "scratch your own itch". Good software gets built by people who actually use it.

Dah00n4• 4 years ago

Is this a joke or a leaked internal Apple discussion? I can't tell.

ho_schi• 4 years ago

Reminds me of ThinkPads old good seven row keyboard and the new six (DISASTER) row keyboard and a lot of changes from Apple with th Touchbar (++DISASTER).

Where is my context menu key? Why Fn+F4 doesn't suspend the machine anymore. Who regrouped the keys in this bad layout (Six Row Disaster). Somebody didn't understand the difference between clean design and useful design?

pksebben• 4 years ago

I realize this is a more nuanced take on metric analysis, but the title just makes me remember that before I remapped caps lock, my most frequent use of it was to turn it back off when it had been accidentally pressed.

HenriTEL• 4 years ago

At the end humans are native machine speakers.

grogers• 4 years ago

I'm too lazy to deal with remapping it, so I typically pry the caps lock key off my keyboards. My kids always say that my keyboard is broken and try to fix it...

prepend• 4 years ago

That’s interesting to me as to your motivation for doing this.

Do you just hate seeing the caps lock key?

Wouldn’t it be easier just not to use it? If your problem is accidentally tapping it, wouldn’t that still happen with the key pried off?

lproven• 4 years ago

Hint, folks. The post is not about keyboards. It's not about typing or any other form of text entry, either.

Hichm• 4 years ago

If you had the power to change someone's life for the better and make them happy (and you had it), would you do it?

joshuarubin• 4 years ago

I have no CamelCase key and I must write variables

I have no capslock and I must scream

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