When is the last time you voluntarily pressed Caps Lock for its intended purpose? When was the last time that last time wasn’t meant as an ironic mocking of the key’s intended function? And yet, the key is so easy to reach, nestled in the loving embrace of the fan favorites Shift and Tab. It seems quite unfortunate that such a useless key has such a prime piece of keyboard real-estate.

Replacing the Caps Lock key is definitely not groundbreaking – indeed, many archeologists believe that the Caps Lock key is itself an usurper. Harkening back to the days of yore, many modern developers opt to replace the function of the caps lock key with Control, hearkening back to the ways of their ancestors, who in the early 1640’s apparently manufactured keyboards with the Controlle Ceye in that position. For a period in the early 18th century, it was popular to place an additional Backſpace there instead. The Caps Lock key was only seated in its modern-day position beginning in the 1830’s, where it has remained a thorn in the side of many coders ever since.

But what can be done to right the wrongs that history has wrought? Many traditionalists revert the key to its historical mappings. Randall Monroe did something awesome, as usual. Both of these are more useful than the Caps Lock key in its native state. Another useful technique is to turn the Billy Mays key into an additional modifier key, allowing you to have even more useful shortcut keys to barely remember.

I use a buckling-spring Customer 104 Keyboard, and love it, but I occasionally miss having modern conveniences such as easily keyboard-accessible volume controls. The idea of repurposing Ctrl, Shift, and Alt for global shortcuts makes me nervous, because real programs use these keys. But real programs generally don’t use Caps Lock in their shortcut keys, so there’s essentially no chance of a collision, and you are likely to be able to select better mnemonics because you have no competition.

The tool I use for my Caps Lock adventure is AutoHotkey. Install the program, then edit your global script. Disabling Caps Lock in the conventional sense is as easy as SetCapsLockState AlwaysOff, but CapsLock will still function in your own aliases. Simply remapping keys is trivial, and fairly complex things are easily possible in the script as well – an excellent place to start looking is Lifehacker’s extensive AutoHotkey directory.

Among other changes, I’ve mapped CapsLock+Up/Down to volume controls, CapsLock+PageUp/PageDn to the media next/previous, and CapsLock+Home is Pause/Play. These combinations are both extremely easy to reach and extremely unlikely to be used by other programs. You are more likely to have the media keys already, but you get the drift – there is a large number of unused key combinations available that you can repurpose for whatever actions would be most beneficial in your daily life. If you’re feeling ambitious, script them up to do something smart. You have dozens and dozens of potential shortcut keys waiting to serve, and you don’t have to involve six modifier keys or Scroll Lock to avoid trampling over that obscure shortcut that launches HyperTerminal.