It is kinda funny that Apple didn't do anything about Caps Lock when they redesigned their keyboard with the touch bar.
I cannot imagine professionals or casual users who would need quick access to turning caps lock on and off. When you need caps lock over shift, it is because you are planning to write a lot of all cap text, and so, taking a second to turn it on via the touch bar seems okay. It is prime to be relegated to the touch-bar, while plenty of professionals use ESC all the time while touch-typing.
While they were at it, the switch window `command+~` short cut is almost unreachable on non-us like keyboard layouts.
If they were gonna break professional users keyboard workflow, why not fix some of the more glaring mistakes in current keyboard layout while they were at it?
They did. Under System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys… you can now map Caps Lock to Escape which you couldn’t before. It’s just not activated by default.
> the switch window `command+~` short cut is almost unreachable
Change it under System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Keyboard: Move focus to next window
Particularly with the caps-lock key I don't see why it takes up so much real estate.
> Change it under System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Keyboard: Move focus to next window
It is not like Apple doesn't know my locale. Why isn't it set up for easy use on it?
On the other hand, I do wonder what went into designing local keyboard variants. Many are quite hostile towards common programming characters, to the point where I actually use a US keyboard, despite it missing 3 letters from my native language's alphabet!
> Particularly with the caps-lock key I don't see why it takes up so much real estate.
History, removing it outright would likely have caused more consternation than the escape key change.
Blame this one on defaults all you want, but keyboards actually have defined layouts for keys, the touchbar is probably the best way of easing into changing that. But you can't boil the ocean and all that.
> On the other hand, I do wonder what went into designing local keyboard variants. Many are quite hostile towards common programming characters, to the point where I actually use a US keyboard, despite it missing 3 letters from my native language's alphabet!
Also history, in the English case, the keyboard variants were designed will before computers and programming languages. Starting in 1870 for most typewriters in English, and moving from there. I highly doubt any design went into any local variants and computer programming simplicity.
There was software such as PCKeyboardHack/Karabiner and something else before that that let you do remappings not available through Keyboard Preferences. Every Mac OS X release breaks keyboard internals and things like PCKeyboardHack stop working (Sierra was out for almost a year before Karabiner Elements was fully functional). Mac OS X support for custom keyboard layouts is atrocious, and IMO Macbook keyboards are garbage compared to shaped (models up to x220/t420) Thinkpad keyboards. If you look around at some of the different keyboard layouts and try some remappings out what you will probably find is that remapping Caps Lock to Backspace is the best for general typing (this started with the MIT AI Lab's "Knight TV" terminals designed by Tom Knight). I haven't tried it but this should be possible with Karabiner Elements in Sierra now.
On my old Thinkpad X1 Carbon, the Caps Lock key was replaced with Home and End keys. I thought it was a brilliant idea, although I immediately remapped them to Backspace and Control respectively. The laptop also had a primitive touch-bar in place of the function keys which I actually rather liked, although the implementation was lacking. (And, unlike Apple, they kept a physical Esc key!)
Unfortunately, both of these changes were not particularly popular. I think people only disliked the Home/End keys in place of Caps Lock because it was weird and different—I saw a lot of whining online, but nobody ever complained about not being able to use Caps Lock any more!
To some extent, I see where people are coming from: I regularly use at least two different external keyboards as well as my laptop keyboard, so it's hard to get used to a weird layout in just one place out of three. I'm an early adopter at heart and willing to power through the inconvenience for what I see as a better design but I also understand that it's too much bother for other people. (And, honestly, the upside isn't that big!)
On later generations, ThinkPad switched back to a more standard layout. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple wanted to avoid a similar reaction in changing the keyboard layout too much, especially since their touchbar was already a big enough change to stir up controversy.
I couldn't stand this layout. The entire change was driven by the soft-key function row, which was pretty awful. The 1st gen X1 Carbon had a fully functional keyboard with no need for soft keys, and it worked perfectly, so the frustration was compounded by feeling like they tried to fix something that wasn't broken.
The soft keys forced the home/end keys out, as well as the Escape key and the Delete key. Home/end landed on CapsLock, which was then relegated to a double-tap of the shift key. The double-tab feature was so sensitive that it could be activated just by typing normally, which suddenly would activate capslock.
To add to the confusion, the Escape key landed on the ~ key's location, which then had to be relocated to the right-hand windows key placement.
The delete key was jammed in by cutting the Backspace key in half and putting it there.
It took weeks of pure frustration and anger for me to even begin getting used to all this. The experience permanently turned me against soft touch bars on the function key row.
I get your point about switching keyboards can get confusing, as well as it looks kinda weird at first, which is definitely enough to make people complain.
It's much more ergonomically convenient to have the command key under the thumb. I had issues with this only for the first two weeks after moving to Mac and now it's natural.
>I cannot imagine professionals or casual users who would need quick access to turning caps lock on and off.
Then you have a very limited imagination. There are lots of reasons that people need and use caps lock.
Off the top of my head-- Broadcast jorunalism. Every news story you hear on TV or radio is written in all caps. The same is true of the speeches by most professional public speakers.
I'm sad to say it's still very commonly used by CAD jockeys, as graphical conventions dictate that much of the textual detail in construction documents should be in all-caps. Of course you'd think a "sophisticated" BIM system like Revit could handle this for you automatically, and yet...
On my Irish keyboard layout (and therefore presumably the UK one also), it's mapped to command-` by default, i.e. the same physical keys as command-~ on a US keyboard. This is also common across every OS for shortcuts relying on tilde in video games for example)
I'm going to be anecdotal again, but I use caps lock fairly regularly when I'm writing code. It's very useful for COMPILE_TIME_CONSTANTS and MY_MACRO_THAT_SCARES_SMALL_CHILDREN in C++ code especially.
I have a project that provides a little tool for Windows and a lot of documentation for Windows, Linux and Mac to map Caps Lock to Escape as well as remapping keys in general.
It's not so hard to create a keyboard layout using the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) [0]. I don't know if it can do everything that uncap can, but I'm pretty sure it can do most things, and it doesn't need a separate program to be running, because the keyboard layout is just installed as part of Windows.
A number of my favourite keyboard layouts are at http://keyboards.jargon-file.org/ (notably Pseudo-VT320, which turns AltGr into a Linux-like compose key).
It looks a bit old, but works fine under Windows 8 and 10.
You cannot remap Caps Lock key with Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator. If it were really that straightforward, then Vim users would not be forced to rely on registry hacks or tools like Uncap or AutoHotKey to map Caps Lock to Escape [0].
If you dislike editing Windows registry like me, you need a separate program to be running.
I cannot imagine professionals or casual users who would need quick access to turning caps lock on and off. When you need caps lock over shift, it is because you are planning to write a lot of all cap text, and so, taking a second to turn it on via the touch bar seems okay. It is prime to be relegated to the touch-bar, while plenty of professionals use ESC all the time while touch-typing.
While they were at it, the switch window `command+~` short cut is almost unreachable on non-us like keyboard layouts.
If they were gonna break professional users keyboard workflow, why not fix some of the more glaring mistakes in current keyboard layout while they were at it?