Caps Lock Key Alternatives

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you five alternatives to using the Caps Lock key. 

A lot of things I'm going to show you will be useful even if you don't have the Caps Lock key disabled. You'll learn some things here about word processing, text styling, and also Accessibility features. So here are some alternatives if you have disabled or reassigned the Caps Lock key on your Mac. 

The way you would do that is to go into System Settings and then go down to Keyboard. Then go to Keyboard Shortcuts and look for Modifier Keys. Here's the Caps Lock key and you can turn it Off by setting it to No Action or assign it to one of the other modifier keys or even the Escape key. Now I'm not saying you should do that. Some people do it because they find they accidentally hit the Caps Lock key and then type a bunch of capital letters that they didn't want. Others find it more useful as an another modifier key. But if you like the Caps Lock key then by all means keep using it as normal. However, if you have disabled it here are some alternatives for emphasizing letters and words. 

First, the most obvious. Simply use the Shift Key which you can easily use to type one capital letter but you can continue to hold down and type several. This works fine if you just have to emphasize, say, one word. This also works great when you need to type acronyms and initials. Like this or this. Just a few letters and it is pretty easy to hold down the Shift Key with one finger while you type with the others. 

Another option is that you've got a function that will allow you to capitalize a selection. So you can select a word after typing it as lower case. Then go to Edit and look for Transformation. Then you'll find Make Upper Case. Simply use that menu item and it will switch all the letters there to uppercase. If you use this a lot you can go into System Settings and then to Keyboard and then back into Keyboard Shortcuts. Then you can go and create your own under App Shortcuts. I'm going to add one here and set it for All Applications since the Transformations Menu is found in lots of different apps. I'm going to type the exact name of the menu item. Then I'm going to assign a keyboard shortcut. So I'm going to use Control Option Command and U and Done. Now you can check in Apps under Edit Transformation and see the keyboard shortcut has been added. So now you can just select some letters and use the shortcut to quickly capitalize it. 

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Now if you're working in a word processor, like Pages or Microsoft Word, there is an even better option for you. Say, for instance, I want to make the name of this town all caps. So what I can do here is instead of transforming it to uppercase I can assign a Style that includes uppercase. In the Format sidebar here, under Style, I can go to this menu here, which has a little gear as an icon there, it's Text Options. Then I can set Capitalization to All Caps. You can see how that converts to all caps. Now it hasn't permanently converted it there. It has applied a Style. So I can actually switch it back to None and it remembers that the first letter there was capitalized and the rest lowercase. It actually keeps the case of each letter there. It is just applying a style to make lowercase letters appear as uppercase. 

Now you can go even further with this. I can assign All Caps here like that and then under Character Styles here I can go into that and add a new character style. So I'm going to add it here and I'm going to call this Town Name. Now I can apply this character style somewhere else. So I can go to the next time, I've got the same text there, and I can apply the Character Style, Town Name. Now the great thing about this is I can update it throughout the document. So say I have a hundred of these throughout my document. I can select one like this and then go and change it. I can switch it back. Let's say I don't want it to be all caps anymore. I just want it to be regular and in addition to that I'm going to make it Bold, Italic, and maybe change the color. I think that is a better look than all caps. Notice how Town Name now has an asterisk next to it meaning that I've altered it. I can click here and Update the Town Name. Look at what happens to the second instance of that. That will update as well. If I had a hundred of them all one hundred would update because they would all be linked to the same Character Style and I can update it whenever I want. So it makes it a much better alternative than making it permanently uppercase. This way you can always go back and change the style. 

Caps Lock key aside, this is a very useful technique to use in Pages for a variety of different style applications.  

Many other apps have the same functionality. Like, for instance, Numbers and Keynote.  Even third party apps. Like here I am in Pixelmator Pro and I've got text here. I can go to the Text Tools and I see the same kind of button right here. There's Capitalization. I can switch to All Caps and I can switch back to None. 

But many apps don't have that. For instance there is no way to do that here in Notes. You can't change capitalization like that here. 

Now of course I should add that if your purpose is to simply emphasize a word or more you can simply use something like Bold, a quick Command B will do that. Bold is a much better alternative than making something all caps. You can use Bold, you can use colors, you can use Italics, you can use Underline. All sorts of different things. Even a different Font in word processors to do this. You can do the same thing in Mail, for instance. Here I can easily Bold this word here or make it a different font, or different size. All sorts of things. 

But, of course, one problem with that is you can't always use Styles. For instance a lot of social media apps don't allow you to stylize your text and uppercase is really one of the few ways you can emphasize a word. But do keep in mind that using uppercase for more than one or two words is considered shouting. You may see it as just easier text to read or maybe to get a point across but if you were to Capitalize say an entire post usually the other person sees that as you shouting at them. If that is not your intention then you may want to use uppercase sparingly in social media posts, emails, text messages and so on. 

But what about a real alternative to Caps Lock. Actually being able to type letters and they appear as uppercase even if you don't have the Caps Lock key enabled. Well there is one way to do this. If you go into System Settings and then you go into Accessibility, there is an Accessibility Function called Sticky Keys. You can find it under Keyboard. You can see Sticky Keys right here and you can turn it On. Look at information here to see the options. So here I've got it set to display the indicator and at the top left. So what does this do? Well with Sticky Keys on to use the Shift Key or any modifier key like Command, Control, and Option, you can press it once and it switches it On, like you're still holding it down. Then you press it again to turn it Off, like you've released it. So, for instance, here if I wanted to type in all caps I could just press Shift once and you can see that shift indicator appear at the top left. Now the next letter I type will be uppercase but that instantly turns Off Sticky Keys. So what you want to do is you want to press Shift twice. If you press it once you notice how the up arrow is kind of a gray there. A second time right away will make it white. Now it's locked down so the Shift key is On until you turn it Off. So now I can type, like that, and if I press Shift again it releases it. Just keep in mind there is no way to just have the Shift Key do this. The Command Key, for instance, will do it like that so the next thing that I would press, like A for Command A, is going to work with Sticky Keys. Of course Sticky Keys can be a useful feature for lots of people if you find that you have difficulty holding down modifier keys while using keyboard shortcuts and other commands. 

I hope you found some of this useful. Thanks for watching.