by Prasanna Vignesh
9. March 2007 05:45
The caps lock key is one of those remnants of another age of
computers, back when people used to shout at each other more often.
Since it's not entirely useful anymore we'll learn how to disable it.
If you aren't interested in the explanation you can skip to the bottom
for the registry files.
Windows doesn't have a default setting to allow for disabling the
key, so what we have to do is re-map the key to something non-existent
so as to completely disable it.
Here's the format of the binary data, with the important parts in bold and various colors:
00000000 00000000 0200000000 00003A00 00000000
Here's how it works:
- The first 16 zeros are just there to waste space.
- The "02″ in bold represents how many keys you are going to re-map
plus 1. (It really represents the length of the data, but whatever)
- The orange bolded "0000″ is the key we actually want Windows to map TO, which in this case is nothing, or 0.
- The blue bolded "3A00″ is the key we are mapping from, in this case the caps lock key.
- The next 8 zeros are there to waste space as the null terminator.
You can map between multiple keys by incrementing the "02″ and then
adding another of the colorful bold blocks in the middle. The 3A00 in
the mix is the scan code. For example, if you wanted to disable the caps lock key and then change scroll lock into a caps lock key:
00000000 00000000 0300000000 00003A00 3A004600 00000000
Now that you've learned how these things work internally, you can
download and extract the zipfile which contains the following files:
| ChangeCapsToControl.reg |
Changes Caps Lock to be a Control key |
| ChangeCapsToShift.reg |
Changes Caps Lock to be a Shift key |
| SwitchCapsToScrollLock.reg |
Disables Caps Lock and swaps Scroll lock to be Caps Lock |
| KillCapsLock.reg |
Disables Caps Lock |
| DisableKeyboardRemap |
Uninstalls the preference by deleting the key |
Once you've applied one of these registry files, you'll have to
reboot your computer for it to work. To uninstall, you can use the
uninstall registry tweak, or you can simply delete the Scancode Map key
entirely.
Download Keyboard Mappings Registry Tweaks. KeyboardMappings.zip (1.52 kb)
Update: Thanks to lisa for pointing out - This should work in any
version of Windows, including XP. We specialize in Vista here, so I
often forget to mention that =)
Note: For more Windows Vista Tips, Tricks & Tweaks.
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