I was just having a discussion with my youngest brother, aged 15, a couple of days ago and I found out that when he"s typing, he uses the Caps Lock key for capitalizing characters. Personally, my brain is hardwired to use the Shift key so I was quite taken aback to hear that my brother utilizes Caps Lock even when he wants to capitalize a single character.
So if he wants to write "My brother writes at Neowin", his typing flow is Caps Lock on > type "M" > Caps Lock off > type "y brother writes at Neowin". I don"t even remember the last time I used the Caps Lock key, if ever, so this flow is completely foreign to me.
During a lighthearted debate, I told him that the Caps Lock is so useless for me that I wish that it was removed from the keyboard. That said, I do understand one genuine use-case where Caps Lock could be useful. For example, when you want to write a long string of characters in upper case and holding down the Shift key might become too tiring. However, I doubt this is a big enough selling point for Caps Lock, I can"t recall a scenario where I have ever had to do this.
Both me and my brother have similar online habits and gaming preferences so I just found it a bit strange that he has a strong preference for Caps Lock whereas I am more partial to Shift.
And now I want to know the preferences of our readers just to see whether the usage of these keys is skewed or if there are equal proponents for both. It is important to note that this is more to increase my awareness in this area than anything else, I won"t judge you if you use Caps Lock. Call this my version of tabs versus spaces. As such, please feel free to vote below and sound off in the comments section (while keeping it civil)!