Photo: Octofocus2 (Shutterstock)
These days, Caps Lock’s main purpose is to inadvertently make it seem like people are yelling after they mistakenly hit it while fumbling for the Shift key. Caps Lock is so unused, in fact, Google doesn’t even include it on its newer Chromebooks. If you find your Mac’s Caps Lock key serves no purpose other than as an accidental button press THAT TURNS YOU INTO AN ANGRY TYPIST, there’s an easy way to make it useful.
Why do our computers have a Caps Lock key in the first place?
Caps Lock used to be useful: Back before computers, typewriters had Shift lock, which physically shifted and locked the keys into a different position, allowing you to type capitals and secondary characters without needing to hold the Shift key. While that made a lot of sense in a time when keys were more cumbersome to press in tandem, things are different with the modern computer keyboard.
For one, Caps Lock only sticks to typing capital letters, not secondary characters. Two, keys on our keyboards today are much easier to press than those on typewriters—for most able-bodies typers, it takes little effort to keep the Shift key held down while typing the letters you’d like to capitalize, and typing in all caps is rare (intentionally, anyway).
For a while now, Caps Lock has been more of a nuisance than a purposeful key. However, if you’d like to give the key some purpose on your Mac, it’s quite easy:
How to change Caps Lock to something else on Mac
To start, open System Preferences > Keyboard, then choose “Modifier Keys.” Here, you’ll see a series of keys from your keyboard whose action can be changed, including Caps Lock. Click the Caps Lock dropdown menu to find the following actions you can assign to the key:
Caps LockControlOptionCommandEscape GlobeNo ActionIn my opinion, the key action that makes the most sense here is Escape. It’s how I first learned about this key-mapping feature, since my MacBook Pro came without a physical Escape key. Turning my unused Caps Lock key into an Escape option offered some extra precision I was missing before.
Of course, many MacBooks (and all Bluetooth Magic Keyboards) now have physical Escape keys, so you might not see the need for a redundant “esc.” In that case, you could pick from any of the other options, but most of us probably won’t have much need for any of them, either. We already have two Command keys and two Options keys, and while we only have one Control key, it is on the same side of the keyboard as Caps Lock. Again, redundant.
In that case, the best function for Caps Lock is, in my view, nothing. Choose “No Action” from the dropdown list, and your Caps Locks key becomes a tiny museum on your keyboard: a key which once had a purpose, but no longer does, lovingly kept aboard to be ignored. Is this “something useful,” as promised by the headline of this article? I would argue that not accidentally typing in all caps is useful indeed.
That said, your keyboard is yours: This setting allows you to remap multiple keys to whatever actions you’d like, opening up a host of possibilities for different use cases. If you need five Escape keys, go ham. If you want each key to do something different than the name printed on it, hey, it’s your keyboard. Really, anything is better than TYPING IN ALL CAPS WHEN YOU DON’T MEAN TO, AND HAVING TO CORRECT THE RECORD WITH A HUMBLE “sorry, Caps Lock.”
