One of the users of our household desktop Windows 10 box is two years old. His approach to the keyboard can best be described as “all-encompassing”. When I want to log in, Microsoft’s software rejects my password and then reminds me that “CAPS LOCK is on.” Instead of taking the trouble to display that message, assuming that the CAPS LOCK key actually has been pressed, why not simply re-try whatever was typed as though the CAPS LOCK key had not been on? How hard would that be? Presumably Windows sees every key press event. How hard would it be to flip the case of whatever was typed in and try again? (And perhaps turn CAPS LOCK off automatically if it had been turned on while the machine was on the login screen?)
Apple fanboys: Is this something that Steve Jobs figured out or does Mac OS exhibit the same behavior?
very old style telnet and possibly SSH does do something like this. If you try to login as PHILG (assuming your username is philg) and then type the password, it assumes you are using a terminal without lower-case capability. The exact rules and limitations are lost to my memory, however.
OS X v10.9.5 also rejects the password. It does helpfully put a “caps lock on” indicator just to the right of the password entry area.
-John
(maybe not an Apple fanboy)
Better question: Why does caps lock exist at all?
I believe Facebook tries multiple versions of the typed password with various mixes of uppercasing/lowercasing of letters, numbers, and symbols.
The Windows 10 programmers spent so much time writing spyware to scan your files and log your every keystroke that they didn’t have time to implement features that would actually be useful.
J. Peterson –
Caps Lock is probably mostly there for historical reasons. Typewriters had a Shift-Lock key and, on mechanical typewriters, the force involved with holding down a key meant it was easier to have a lock. I also suspect that there were more forms and other things requiring all-caps at the time.
That said, I suspect that any computer-maker removing the Caps Lock would probably get far more pushback than it would be worth. Arguably it could be a smaller key more out of the way, but still might not be worth it.
My brother said the Pascal compiler used to say, “Semi-colon expected.” and stop.
He argued that if it expected one it should put one in.
I use a CODE keyboard and have it configured to turn the CAPS LOCK key into a CTRL key. Remember back when most keyboards used to have CTRL where the CAPS LOCK is now?. I find, however, that I never use it, because: 1. When I need to use someone else’s computer, there’s a CAPS LOCK key where the CTRL key ought to be; 2. The CTRL key has been in the “wrong” location for so long that my fingers no longer try to reach for it in the “correct” location and I don’t see much point in retraining my fingers to use a location that will be wrong on all other keyboards.
Chromebooks don’t have Caps Lock. Replaced by a Google Search key. Whether that’s an improvement is another question.
One of the very few remaining valid uses of the Caps Lock key is for one-finger (one-hand) typing. (Either an extreme form of disability, or in conjunction with a mouse).
“He argued that if it expected one it should put one in.”
Nicklaus Wirth wouldn’t approve.
This is indeed a dumb question. Maybe not the worlds dumbest Windows 10 question, but right up there.
Think about the obvious ramifications of this. In order for this to work, mixed-case passwords would have to be banned/unallowed, thus making password guessers’ job easier (check out Steve Gibson’s Password Haystack page: https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm). Another way of putting that is “making password security less so”. Maybe this is the way it works in Hollywood movieland. It would go a long way in explaining why “the good guy” in so many movies is able to guess someone else’s password in a couple tries.
Lynn: I am not sure that the reduction in security is as large as you suggest. The proposal is not to make passwords case-insensitive but rather, if the CAPS LOCK key happens to have been pressed, retry with the case flipped. If the password were MicrosoftIsAwesome, for example, the password MICROSOFTisawesome would not be accepted, regardless of the CAPS LOCK mode.