Keyboards evolved from typewriters, devices that have design limitations due to it's mechanical nature.


**CASE STUDY 1: Caps Lock**

It's one of the most useless keys ever. How many times did you pressed it by accident and you were screaming at innocent people? How many times your Vim gone all wonky? It's legacy comes from how you did emphasis on typewriters. Caps occupies sweet spot in home row. That space deserves something that is more usable, something that will be pressed more often.

Since Control is one of the most heavily used modifier keys it's right choice. You can switch Caps with Left Ctrl or just remap Caps to have 3 Ctrl keys.

THAT'S RIGHT. I HAVE NO CAPS AND 3 CTRLS. I WRITE THIS USING SHIFT ONLY. LET THE MADNESS FLOW.


**CASE STUDY 2: Application Menu Key**

Seriously, who's idea it is? He needs to be smacked. Most laptops skips right Super key to fit that bastard. GOD, WHY. I WANT MY MODIFIER KEY. I WANT IT BACK!

Feed xmodmap with this:

**CASE STUDY 3: QWERTY and family**

Try writing *typewriter* on QWERTY keyboard. You see? It's all marketing. It's also designed to make you bit slow (or at leas urban myth says so). Have you ever seen typewriter. It have those arms that hit paper and makes character. If two of them close together they like to stuck. To avoid this QWERTY happened.

There are few nice keyboard layouts. [Programmer's Dvorak](http://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/) is great example. It makes all the heavily used symbols easily accessible. There's also [Colemak](http://colemak.com/) that makes your fingers move less around keyboard.

I'm not yet many enough to make the transition though.

**CASE STUDY 4: Rarely used keys**

This one is even more subjective than others. Insert, Home, PageUp, Page Down, End, Delete - who uses those? Most apps have key chords to do that (not to talk about vim), Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E, etc. This is how it should be done. Why in the would I would take my hand from homer row to do those simple, frequent operations.
PageUp and PageDown are useful in terminal, but they easily could be covered with some Fn + key chord.

Same goes for Print Screen, Pause, Scroll Lock. I used Pause 2 years ago once, to pause output of BIOS. I use Print Screen bit more often - [Magic SysRq key](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key) when it comes to debugging.

Functional keys? 12 of them? Why they make my keyboard so big? Fn + number row them!

Arrow keys - most people do use them, but it could be easily replaced by Fn + WASD. I HJKL everything so I consider them pure evil.