Monday April 23rd 2007, 11:02 pm 
By 
Tags: I’d like to tell you how to take control of the lowly Caps Lock key. I always map my Caps Lock key to Ctrl because, well, as a Caps Lock key it’s useless. I would love to hear from anyone in the comments who actually likes the Caps Lock key. Go ahead, defend its’ eminent uselessness. I hate it. The only reason you might need it is if you are really mad at someone on Instant Messenger and WANT TO YELL AT THEM! And maybe legal briefs. The only people who actually care about the Caps Lock key are Keyboard Class Teachers, because it is a key that is on the keyboard, and thou shalt knoweth thy keyboard layout by heart for Friday’s test.
Back on topic; the Caps Lock key is much better served as a Ctrl key. The main reason is that Ctrl-A jumps the cursor to the beginning of a line of text in just about every single program on a Mac, and Ctrl-E jumps the cursor to the end. I do a lot of typing in the Terminal and also in TextMate. TextMate has a lot of Emacs-ish key bindings (just about every command in Emacs starts with either Ctrl, or Alt, same with the fancier TextMate tricks) and having the Ctrl key right there next to the ‘A’ under my left-hand pinky speeds up commands considerably and allows me to keep my hands on the keyboard more.
I recommend trying it for a few days. It is easy to turn on and off in OS X. Here is the unofficial-but-fully-illustrated guide on how to change it:
1. Cut a hole in the box. Ok… not really, open up System Preferences and click on the “Keyboard & Mouse” icon.
2 . Click on the “Modifier Keys” button at the bottom of the “Keyboard” tab.
3. Select “^ Control” from the first pop-up next to “Caps Lock”, click “OK”, and reawaken the awesome power that has been lying dormant under your left pinky finger!
