blarg: "I spend a lot of time thinking about keyboards, and I wish more people did."

I'm not even mad about the letter layout -- you do you, Dvorak weirdos -- but that we give precious keycap real estate to antiquated arcana and pedestrian novelty at the expense of dozens of everyday interactions, and as far as I can tell we mostly don't even notice it.

• This laptop has dedicated keys to let me select, from levels zero to three, how brightly my keyboard is backlit. If I haven't remapped control to caps I need to twist my wrist awkwardly to cut, copy or paste anything.

• I've got two alt keys, but undo and redo are chords each half a keyboard away from each other. Redo might not exist, or the key sequence could be just about anything depending on the program; sometimes all you can do is either undo, or undo the undo?

• On typical PC keyboards Pause/Break and Scroll Lock, vestigial remnants a serial protocol of ages past, both have premium real estate all to themselves. "Find" is a chord. Search-backwards may or may not be a thing that exists depending on the program, but getting there is an exercise. Scroll lock even gets a capslock-like LED some of the time; it's that important! [...]

• "Ins" -- insert -- is a dedicated key for the "what if delete, but backwards and slowly" option that only exists at all because mainframes are the worst. Are there people who toggle this on purpose? Has anyone asked them if they're OK? I can't select a word, sentence or paragraph with a keystroke; control-A lets me either select everything or nothing.

  Finally, SysRq -- short for "System Request" -- gets its own button too, and it almost always does nothing because the one thing it does when it works -- "press here to talk directly to the hardware" -- is a security disaster only slightly obscured by a usability disaster. [...]

Anyway, here's a list of how you remaps capslock to control on various popular OSes, in a roughly increasing order of lunacy:

• OSX: Open keyboard settings and click a menu.

• Linux: setxkboptions, I think. Maybe xmodmap? Def. something in an .*rc file somewhere though. Or maybe .profile? Does gnome-tweak-tool still work, or is it called ubuntu-tweak-tool or just tweak-tool now? This seriously used to be a checkbox, not some 22nd-century CS-archaeology doctoral thesis. What an embarrassment.

• Windows: Make a .reg file full of magic hexadecimal numbers. You'll have to figure out how on your own, because exactly none of that documentation is trustworthy. Import it as admin with regedit. Reboot probably? This is ok. This is fine.

• iOS: Ive says that's where the keys go so that's where the keys go. Think of it as minimalism except for the number of choices you're allowed to make. Learn to like it or get bent, pleb.

• Android: Buy an app. Give it permission to access all your keystrokes, your location, your camera and maybe your heart rate. The world's most profitable advertising company says that's fine.

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