Making Use of Caps Lock
If you’re like me (and who isn’t), the caps lock key is an annoying waste of plastic. Its only value seems to be to type things to offend people. Luckily, most operating systems allow you to map it to control, or another useful key.
As a fairly new emacs user (and a long-term shell user), having a control key near where my fingers already makes many things far more accessible to me. Highly recommended.
But there’s another thing that the caps lock provides that quickly moves from annoyance to useful feature:
Just about every keyboard ever made has a caps lock indicator. Such a wonderful thing when used correctly.
Amit Singh over at google had a blog post about manipulating keyboard LEDs which inspired me to add this feature to my buildwatch app pretty much immediately.
Due to a fairly dumb bug I fixed today, it hasn’t been working (and I wasn’t paying attention to it anyway), but now, when anyone does a build against my build farm and the build breaks, my keyboard light will come on.
Sort of makes me want to write some bad code.
