Is It Time to Say Goodbye to Caps Lock?

Is it time to permanently retire the Caps Lock key? Pieter Hintjens thinks so.

Hintjens, the CEO of iMatix, has launched the Capsoff organization in a campaign urging hardware manufacturers to ditch the oft-abused and misused key. Hintjens’ plan is to build the entire infrastructure for the movement using only freely available tools from Google. He’s already set up a Blogger Capsoff blog and a forum at Google Groups.

“The Caps key is an abomination,” Hintjens writes on his blog. “It’s a huge key, stuck right there where the Ctrl used to be, and as far as I know, it’s only used by 419 scammers and Fortran programmers.”

Zealous net newbies have also subjected the Caps Lock key to overuse, composing e-mails and newsgroup posts entirely in capital letters, an ugly and inelegant style of communication akin to screaming. In fact, the Capsoff organization’s slogan is “STOP SHOUTING!”