August 17, 2011

Undocumented Shortcut for Caps Lock in Chrome OS

One of the most important changes Google made when designing the keyboard for Chrome OS notebooks was replacing the Caps Lock key with a search key. While the search key is not very useful since it only opens a new tab, the Caps Lock key made a lot of comments, forum threads and emails unreadable.


If you really need to use the Caps Lock key, there's a way to change the search key into a Caps Lock key in the settings. Unfortunately, this is time consuming, especially if you constantly switch between the search key and the Caps Lock key. There's a better way: press both Shift keys at the same time to enable or disable Caps Lock. It's an undocumented shortcut that works in the latest versions of Chrome OS.

{ Thanks, Cougar. }
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10 comments:

  1. AmirAugust 17, 2011 at 4:56 AM

    What a lot of people don't know is that there's at least one keyboard layout that uses Caps Lock not for typing capital Latin letters, but for typing different of the same language. That language in question is Hebrew.

    That Standards Institution of Israel is working on a new standard keyboard layout, but until it is published Hebrew users need the Caps Lock. Chrome OS devs can also use some other key for writing these characters, but they must be aware of it.

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  2. baldwin park orlandoAugust 17, 2011 at 12:09 PM

    I wonder why Google had to change the keyboard. I mean there's a lot of keyboards today that have the search button. So why do they have to put in the search key in replacement of the caps lock? Well I'm sure there's a very good logic to this.

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  3. saurabh rAugust 21, 2011 at 9:15 AM

    I use it for just about any abbreviation. . Take "U.S.A." for instance. True touch typing would have you using both shifts, letting go of the shifts to press the period. Although this case is a bit extreme, it demonstrates why the Caps is, in certain cases, necessary and efficient.

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  4. AnonymousAugust 27, 2011 at 4:51 PM

    No idea how I unknowingly triggered this by apparently hitting both shift keys, but I'm glad I was able to undo it after reading this post.

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  5. AnonymousAugust 30, 2011 at 11:26 AM

    I accidentally triggered this a few times before I was able to find the right terms to google up this page, and it was EXTREMELY annoying. Counter to intuition, clicking the capslock icon that appeared in the corner did NOT toggle it, leaving me baffled as to how I had gotten into capslock and how I was going to get out. I poured through the settings and I couldn't find the key combo I had somehow accidentally pressed anywhere.

    And I have a degree in computer science. What about the people chromeos is actually being marketed to?

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  6. Lasse NørfeldtSeptember 4, 2011 at 11:38 PM

    Would be nice if it worked like the soft keyboard on android. One press capitalize the first pressed letter and two presses capitalize all next letters (caps lock)..

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  7. LGBSeptember 8, 2011 at 2:45 AM

    Pressing both shift keys is used for alter keymaps, at least on my desktop systems, since I need more kbd layouts (English, Hungarian, Norwegian, Finnish). If I every buy a chrome book it would be problematic for me then ... Hopefully this can be modified ... I don't need caps lock though, so I would love to use the "both shift keys" to alter between kbd layouts (if it's possible at all on c.book to use more kbd layouts, hmm).

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  8. AnonymousNovember 2, 2011 at 7:20 PM

    @Cougar - Thanks for posting!

    ~ b

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  9. baroncelliJune 24, 2012 at 2:55 PM

    Note, it looks like in the most recent versions of Chrome OS it's not just both shifts anymore, but both shifts + search key.

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  10. AnonymousJuly 3, 2012 at 6:11 PM

    FOR ME, IT'S JUST 'ONE SHIFT + SEARCH KEY' TO TOGGLE CAPSLOCK. WHAT A BUNCH OF ASSHOLE DESIGNERS...

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