site news archive - rid the world of caps lock!
27th September 2006 - 21:19
Well, I figured as I haven't got around to a redesign/recode/replacement of the site yet I better post something on here. You never know, some people might even find this useful too.
I've been working on a laptop recently and one thing has really been bugging me, every time I go for the Ctrl key I'm hitting the Fn key in the corner of the keyboard instead, as you can imagine this is slightly annoying. Another thing that has bugged me about every keyboard for a long while is the caps lock key. I never use it and it sits there taunting me everytime I acciDENTALLY HIT IT.
So then, two birds with one stone, I wondered if it was possible to remap the caps lock key to be another Ctrl. Turns out it's actually pretty easy (as long as you're running 2k or XP).
Warning: This does require editing the registry. If you're not confident with doing so it's probably best to steer clear, or at least take a backup so you can fix it if you break it all horribly.
The first thing to do is to open up regedit and navigate your way to HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlKeyboard Layout. There is also a registry key Keyboard Layouts, this is not the one you want. When you have located the Keyboard Layout key right click in the right hand pane and select new binary value. Call this new value Scancode Map.
If you now double click on the scancode map value you'll get a window popup where you can edit the value. To remap caps lock to ctrl enter the following into the window:
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
02 00 00 00 1d 00 3a 00
00 00 00 00
Reboot the machine and you should find yourself rid of the caps lock key and with a shiny new ctrl in it's place.
Another quick example, if you wanted to remap the caps lock key to something like scroll lock as well as making caps lock into a ctrl enter the following into the scancode map registry value:
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
03 00 00 00 1d 00 3a 00
3a 00 46 00 00 00 00 00
Reboot and there you go.
For more information on remapping of scan codes see Scan Code Mapper for Windows. You can find a table of scancodes for the other keys in the keyboard scan code specification , take a look at the scan code table starting on page 16. The code to look for is in the first column "scan 1 make" and the one next to the key name. E.g. The code for caps lock is 3A and L Ctrl is 1D. If the direct link doesn't work look for the document on Keyboard Scan Codes.
I hope someone that reads this finds this useful, and even if they don't I can feel I've done my bit in the war against caps lock ;-).