Disabling the caps lock delay on the aluminum keyboard

Having tried this with 5 separate aluminum keyboards (I bought them for our entire household), I'm convinced this is an intended 'feature' of the keyboard itself. Note that it
requires a press (or long tap) to turn on Caps Lock, but only a short tap to turn it off.

This behavior is there both before and after doing Software Update to get the latest drivers, etc.

I too remap the useless Caps Lock to be Control and find this delay/press issue very disconcerting since tapping the real Control key works just fine... try this:

tap Control-F several times using the real Control key.. you get real CTRL-F's
tap Control-F several times using the remapped Caps Lock key... you get "ffffff"...

horrible!

How can we get past this behavior? I'm just afraid its built into the keyboard itself and not accessible via some .plist config file... PLEASE SOMEONE LET US KNOW IF YOU FIND A FIX FOR THIS! I adore the keyboard EXCEPT for this single flaw.

I'd just like to add my two-bits of support for this request as a capslock-to-control swapper myself. I run into this delay many times in a day, where I get a 'd' rather than a control-d for example. This 'feature' should be automatically disabled when the physical caps-lock key has been remapped to anything else.

This is on a wireless aluminum keyboard.

I'm in the same boat. I love the new keyboard but have spent the last month or so thinking I was at fault every time I failed to enter a control sequence in Terminal. The ideal fix, as darth_fiber suggested, is to remove this delay when Caps Lock is remapped.

First we had the eject key, which used to work instantly and now has an imposed delay. Now the caps lock key. Next we'll have to hold down the Escape key to get it to register. Can we have a system preference checkbox for "I know what I'm doing when I press keys"?

I don't have an Al kbd, but you might try these two suggestions.

1. Go to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard. Click on Modifier Keys. In the window that opens, for the Caps Lock key, select "No Action"

2. Install the "No CapsLock" script. Download at
http://home2.btconnect.com/Taniwha/ (look near bottom of page)

 Cheers, Tom 😉

Thanks for your suggestion Tom, but that's not really what we're trying to do.

On early keyboards (when I started typing on computer terminals (in the 70s/80s, yes, before personal computers, the Control key was the key to the left of "A". That was great for programmers since lots of things used Control (shell, Emacs, etc). At some point, the Powers That Be (TM) decided that Caps Lock belonged to the left of the "A" key, so people like me spent their time either hoarding the old-style keyboards or finding ways of putting Control 'back where it should be'.

So disabling Caps Lock altogether does not achieve this goal. And until the Aluminum keyboard, ALL other Apple keyboards have worked fine under OSX using the Keyboard Modifier Key swap to simply make Caps Lock be Control. This Aluminum keyboard still makes the switch and works, but at the cost of having to hold the key longer as if it still were the Caps Lock key. Many typists may not even notice this difference, but to a touch-typist, the key seems simply not to work at all.
/d

I've been struggling with this problem ever since I picked up the new aluminum bluetooth keyboard. I would gladly appreciate any pointers to fixes or workarounds.

Love the keyboard (aluminum bt version).. but alas, after remapping (which clearly is an OS feature!) to control, the anti-caps lock feature is still in force. This just has to be an oversight when creating this keyboard and I'm even more floored that there isn't a software fix for it.

So what's the Apple line on this folks? Do we just have to return it as defective?

Eric

I work in a software development shop and we purchased a few of the keyboards to give them a spin (wireless and wired). We encountered this problem with all keyboards, and since we commonly map the Caps-Lock key to Control, we won't be purchasing any more until we find a work around.

I hope the keyboards in new laptop models don't have the same "feature", given that it's a big enough deal for me that I wouldn't upgrade.

Just adding a "me too"... I remap caps lock to control, and use emacs editing control characters heavily. This accidental caps lock prevention "feature" is driving me nuts!

It would be good if someone from Apple could tell us if this is fixable in software, or if it is a hardware feature of the keyboard which cannot be changed.

Same problem here with the switch of capslock and control. This creates huge problems trying to use excel in parallels with any decent speed. Any software fixes to this?

Same problem. And I know at least 2 other emacs users on Macs that are hosed by this "feature".

I hope Apple is paying attention to this thread, because I certainly could not buy another Mac laptop if Caps Lock would behave that way. It would force me to switch to a desktop and a third party keyboard. I use Caps Lock as my control key constantly. I am right now typing on a new Aluminum keyboard from apple and this anti-capslock bug has bitten me maybe a hundred times already. I love the look and feel of this keyboard, but it was a gift and it's about to go into permanent storage until some kind of workaround surfaces. It's sad, too, that Apple would do that and never consider the effect on those of us who use their very own remapping feature!!

for anyone that's a decent touch-typist, this is EXTREMELY annoying.

I am no fan of holding a button in order for it to be registered.

If anyone has an idea as to turn this feature OFF - that would be great.

Anyone know if the problem persists when connected to a windows computer?

Cheers,

R

Here is another voice for the choir. For key-swapping emacs users like myself, this is unusable. Apple: Please re-think this.