Control Keys

December 16, 2018

I spend a lot of time thinking about keyboards, and I wish more people did.

I’ve got more than my share of computational idiosyncrasies, but the first thing I do with any computer I’m going to be using for any length of time is remap the capslock key to control (or command, if I find myself in the increasingly “what if Tattoine, but Candy Crush” OSX-land). I’ve made a number of arguments about why I do this over the years, but I think they’re mostly post-facto justifications. The real reason, if there is such a thing, is likely that the first computer I ever put my hands on was an Apple ][c. On the ][c keyboard “control” is left of “A” and capslock is off in a corner. I suspect that whatever arguments I’ve made since, the fact of it is that my muscle memory has been comfortably stuck in that groove ever since.

It’s more than just bizarre how difficult it is to reassign any key to anything these days; it’s weird and saddening, especially given how awful the standard keyboard layout is in almost every respect. Particularly if you want to carry your idiosyncrasies across operating systems, and if I’m anything about anything these days, it’s particular.

I’m not even mad about the letter layout – you do you, Dvorak weirdos – but that we give precious keycap real estate to antiquated arcana and pedestrian novelty at the expense of dozens of everyday interactions, and as far as I can tell we mostly don’t even notice it.

This laptop has dedicated keys to let me select, from levels zero to three, how brightly my keyboard is backlit. If I haven’t remapped control to caps I need to twist my wrist awkwardly to cut, copy or paste anything.
I’ve got two alt keys, but undo and redo are chords each half a keyboard away from each other. Redo might not exist, or the key sequence could be just about anything depending on the program; sometimes all you can do is either undo, or undo the undo?
On typical PC keyboards Pause/Break and Scroll Lock, vestigial remnants a serial protocol of ages past, both have premium real estate all to themselves. “Find” is a chord. Search-backwards may or may not be a thing that exists depending on the program, but getting there is an exercise. Scroll lock even gets a capslock-like LED some of the time; it’s that important!
The PrtScn key that once upon a time would dump the contents of your terminal to a line printer – and who doesn’t want that? – is now given over to screencaps, which… I guess? I’m kind of sympathetic to this one, I have to admit. Social network interoperability is such a laughable catastrophe that sharing pictures of text is basically the only thing that works, which should be one of this industry’s most shameful embarrassments but here we are. I guess this can stay.
My preferred tenkeyless keyboards have thankfully shed the NumLock key I can’t remember ever hitting on purpose, but it’s still a stock feature of OEM keyboards, and it might be the most baffling of the bunch. If I toggle NumLock I can… have the keys immediately to the left of the number pad, again? Sure, why not.
“Ins” – insert – is a dedicated key for the “what if delete, but backwards and slowly” option that only exists at all because mainframes are the worst. Are there people who toggle this on purpose? Has anyone asked them if they’re OK? I can’t select a word, sentence or paragraph with a keystroke; control-A lets me either select everything or nothing.
Finally, SysRq – short for “System Request” – gets its own button too, and it almost always does nothing because the one thing it does when it works – “press here to talk directly to the hardware” – is a security disaster only slightly obscured by a usability disaster.

It’s sad and embarrassing how awkwardly inconsiderate and anti-human these things are, and the fact that a proper fix – a human-hand-shaped keyboard whose outputs you get to choose for yourself – costs about as much as a passable computer is appalling.

Anyway, here’s a list of how you remaps capslock to control on various popular OSes, in a roughly increasing order of lunacy:

OSX: Open keyboard settings and click a menu.
Linux: setxkboptions, I think. Maybe xmodmap? Def. something in an .*rc file somewhere though. Or maybe .profile? Does gnome-tweak-tool still work, or is it called ubuntu-tweak-tool or just tweak-tool now? This seriously used to be a checkbox, not some 22nd-century CS-archaeology doctoral thesis. What an embarrassment.
Windows: Make a .reg file full of magic hexadecimal numbers. You’ll have to figure out how on your own, because exactly none of that documentation is trustworthy. Import it as admin with regedit. Reboot probably? This is ok. This is fine.
iOS: Ive says that’s where the keys go so that’s where the keys go. Think of it as minimalism except for the number of choices you’re allowed to make. Learn to like it or get bent, pleb.
Android: Buy an app. Give it permission to access all your keystrokes, your location, your camera and maybe your heart rate. The world’s most profitable advertising company says that’s fine.