Disabling the caps lock delay on the aluminum keyboard

I'm with you -- this is making me CRAZY. I love the new keyboards but this makes them almost unusable for me.

Also affected here. Starting to drive me nuts, it's sending my emacs/screen/shell finger-bindings all askew, I'm probably going to have to go with a different keyboard if I want to keep my sanity ... I've been trying to slow-down my C- key combos for weeks now, to no avail.

Please help, Apple techies, you're the only ones that can save us! :]

--Misha

I purchased a new alum keyboard about a month ago to be used as an external board for my TiPB and immediately applied the latest keyboard software upgrade. I do not have any accidental protection for this key. The Caps Lock activates on or off whether or not I press it long, short, light, hard, at the edges or in the centre. Maybe Apple has changed the keyboard action in a revision and not publicised it or maybe the software upgrade altered the accident protection.

Delete all the above! Just tried again and discovered that the protection does occur with very very light touch. My original 'light' touch of the key was obviously too 'heavy'.

I'm using wireless kbd and now can avoid annoying behavior by using this neat program (thanks to Nasukoji-san).

http://www.geocities.jp/nasukoji7/download/downloadsetkeyboardled.html
(Download and install SetKeyboardLED_0.2.0.zip)

After installation, caps lock LED remains ON and never experience the caps lock delay. The accidental caps lock press prevention works only when the LED is OFF.

Well, Apple went and did it:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1192

This makes me very sad.

Then the post immediately above yours should make you very happy, right? It solved the problem for me, with a regular wired keyboard. ...

Message was edited by: dreish

Does it really work? Has anyone experienced any crash or instability? Do you have to set the "product_id" and "vendor_id" as mentioned on the download page?

Looks like the author had to go as far as to write a kernel extension to fix this bug...
This makes me very, very nervous, especially if the source comments are in Japanese!! 🙂

Ther is an English page.
http://www.geocities.jp/nasukoji7/download/download_setkeyboardlede.html

I never experienced any crash with Mac Pro (early 2008) + Wireless KBD, Macbook (late 2007) and Macbook Air.

Does it really work? Has anyone experienced any crash or instability?

The problem doesn't occur though I have been using this for 2 weeks.

Do you have to set the "product_id" and "vendor_id" as mentioned on the download page?

You need not necessarily set those parameters.

Only when you want to specify one of the vendors or one of the products, you should set them.

Thanks.

We should probably send a bug report to Apple.

The best I could find is this feedback page:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/

It doesn't have an entry for the keyboard, so I selected MacBook, given that this bug applies to the new laptops too, apparently.

If anyone else knows a better way to let Apple know about this bug, please let me know.

I tried it.

Didn't work for me.

The only thing is seems to do is keep the caps lock led on.

As for the delay, it was still there.

What a shame! This capslock blunder is driving me nuts!

The only thing is seems to do is keep the caps lock led on.

This program exactly executes only it.

When caps-lock (not only LED) is turning on, do you experience the delay?
If you experienced, I think that another problem is occurring.

You have to read the english instructions; they're somewhat cryptic. Someone posted them, here they are again: http://www.geocities.jp/nasukoji7/download/download_setkeyboardlede.html

To make it work for apple kbds (I have a wireless and that works), you have to do this from the Terminal command line:

$ sudo sysctl -w setkeyboardled.vendorid=0x5ac

(nb: that's a zero after the =)

As a previously angry Emacs user, I just love this guy for writing this, if only he had a paypal donate button!

Got it working!

You guys are awesome! Where do I send my donation check to?

These apple aluminum keyboards take a bit to get use to, but I think they're the best designed keyboards out there. They're absolutely lovely! And theoretically you should be able to type faster with a low-throw keyboard.

Much Thanks!

T.

**

You have to read the english instructions; they're somewhat cryptic. Someone posted them, here they are again: http://www.geocities.jp/nasukoji7/download/download_setkeyboardlede.html

To make it work for apple kbds (I have a wireless and that works), you have to do this from the Terminal command line:

$ sudo sysctl -w setkeyboardled.vendorid=0x5ac

(nb: that's a zero after the =)

As a previously angry Emacs user, I just love this guy for writing this, if only he had a paypal donate button!