How often do you actually use CapsLock – deliberately that is?

Most of the time I hit it accidentally then END UP SHOUTING in emails or Tweets. It’s especially a pain sometimes while coding…

We can stop CapsLock from doing it’s capsy thing using AutoHotkey.

The following remaps the CapsLock key to nothing:

Capslock::

Now the CapsLock key doesn’t do anything, the caps LED on the keyboard doesn’t even light up.

We could also remap CapsLock to F6, so we can hit CapsLock in Visual Studio to do a build:

Capslock::F6

This will trigger F6 in all applications, not just in Visual Studio.

To limit the remapping to only when we are in Visual Studio:

SetTitleMatchMode, 2
#IfWinActive Microsoft Visual Studio
Capslock::F6
#IfWinActive

Here the remapping only occurs if the window title contains “Microsoft Visual Studio”. (The SetTitleMatchMode command tells AutoHotKey to look in any part of the title for the match.

Now, outside of Visual Studio, CapsLock behaves normally, but inside VS it will perform a build.

To learn more about AutoHotkey, check out my Pluralsight course: Personal Productivity & Performance Tools for Windows Developers.

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