Windows 10: How to Turn on or off Shift Lock on Touch Keyboard in Windows 11/10

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If you want to enable or disable Shift Lock for Touch Keyboard in Windows 11 or Windows 10, this guide will help you do that. It is possible to turn on or off Shift Lock for your Touch keyboard with the help of the Registry Editor. You might often need to type everything in any […]

This article How to Turn on or off Shift Lock on Touch Keyboard in Windows 11/10 first appeared on TheWindowsClub.com.

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Press Shift Key to turn off Caps Lock

Actually, I get asked this quite a lot

There is, however, a very good reason to prefer this (old) „Typewriter Caps lock“-behavior over the new default, and it's simply this: if „Press the SHIFT key“ (instead of „Press the CAPS LOCK key“) is selected, then the behavior of „Caps lock“ changes from being a „toggle key“ to being a key that can only be used to turn „Caps lock“ on – to turn „Caps lock“ off, one has to press (either) one of the Shift keys.

This can be advantageous for touch typists, who are used to writing long passages of text without looking at the keyboard, and especially so if they're (C/C++) programmers, who may still regularly find themselves typing in variable names of CONSTANTS_IN_UPPERCASE.

That's because, if Caps lock is not a toggle key, it's not necessary to keep track of its current „toggle state“ in your head:

• If I want „Caps lock“ to be on, I can press CAPS as often as I like. If it happened to be enabled already, nothing changes; otherwise, I can be sure it's enabled afterwards.
  
  
• If I want „Caps lock“ to be off, I can simply press SHIFT

This sounds like a hypothetical advantage, but it's not. I work as a programmer, and I often find myself typing in code like the following:

/* Some debugging code; will only be included in debug builds: */
#if defined _DEBUG

Afterwards, I may pause a little, to think about the code line I would like to type in next. Now, if „Caps lock“ is a toggle key, I may (once I decide to continue) be unsure if I actually remembered to turn „Caps lock“ off at the end of ‘_DEBUG’.

Did I? Did I not? – The only way to be sure, is to look.

This is not so, if the „Press the SHIFT key“ behavior is enabled. If unsure, I can just press SHIFT once, be sure of the set state, and merrily continue may way.

That, for me, is the single most important reason to prefer the „Press the SHIFT key“ setting. Also, interestingly, this used to be the default behavior in the old days … at least, until Microsoft decided to ditch Windows 9x in favor of Windows NT¹.

¹ Actually, my memory could be wrong in this regard and I'm not completely sure … maybe someone more knowledgeable in those matters can confirm that the „Caps lock“ default behavior was indeed changed during the switch from Windows 9x to Windows XP?

 

[Bugs in Touch Keyboard] Custom keyboard for Windows 10

Hello!

I have a question regarding creating custom keyboard layouts in Windows 10.

I have a custom keyboard created using Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator 1.4 that only partially works on Windows 10, specifically Touch Keyboard.

Attaching the screenshot of the same keyboard layout as seen in On-Screen Keyboard (which works correctly) and Touch Keyboard (that has bugs).

What you see in the screenshot is that On-Screen Keyboard correctly depicts different layouts on Normal, Shift and Caps-Lock (not Shift+CapsLock though). As for Touch Keyboard, it not only
scrambles the keys in weird order, hitting the shift key twice activates shift state visually and not caps (but light on the caps-lock key does turn on). The reason why I said "visually" is that if you start typing the seemingly shift-state
letters you'll see CAPS-Lock characters. In other words, Touch Keyboard fails to correctly depict the actual layout-state (shift, caps, shift+caps) that is being used.

These bugs are most probably caused by the fact that keyboard was generated using an 11 y/o tool (MSKLC 2007) which is no longer supported.

Unfortunately, I was not able to an updated method for creating custom keyboards.

My question is if there is any new method of creating a custom keyboard that is fully supported by Windows 10?

The distinction between CAPS-Lock and Shift layouts is imperative for my use-case.

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/csnCOwD.png

Source KLC file used to create this keyboard can be found here: GeorgianCapital/Georgian Capital (QWERTY).klc at master · Anbani/GeorgianCapital

(For some reason I can't use hyperlinks and image attachments)

 

Press Shift Key to turn off Caps Lock

In Windows 7 there was a Keyboard tab that let you use the Shift key to turn off Caps Lock, it seems to be missing in Windows 10.

Anyone know how to set this?