With mechanical typewriters there was good reason to have the shift lock key located above the shift key: shift lock was used to physically locked or jam the shift key into place and so needed to be adjacent to the shift key, furthermore the mechanical nature of typewriters meant there was very little or no chance the key could be pressed by accident.
The Caps Lock key is different (it functions differently, but that’s not germane here) – there is no reason it needs to be physically located near the shift key, it is easy to inadvertently hit without noticing and if you’re not a touch typist you might not immediately notice your mistake, but I do notice the keyboard designers mistake in putting it there.
I’m not suggesting we don’t need the caps lock key – but why not move it somewhere else? However, while we are at redesigning the keyboard lets get rid of the ‘insert key’!
UPDATE
Well it looks like there are a copy of options that might help, including:
- For OS X users they can disable the key, or…
- Add a warning
- Or as Adam Knight suggested: “turn on Sticky Keys in Universal Access and then hit Shift five times to turn it on, then press Shift again and type until I’m done using it. It requires far more care to turn on and does the same thing, mostly.“
Although I still prefer redesigning the keyboard – a bigger problem I grant you but at least it’s not a hack.
