Get Rid of Useless Keys

Oh, I suppose we all do it.  Struggle with little stupid things that bug me, without even thinking about ways to solve them.  They are little problems in daily life whose frustrations don't even compound enough to make you think twice about them.

While trying to get something done this morning, I realized that I had accidentally hit the insert and caps lock key more than once this morning.  I'm a touch typist, so it didn't occur to me that something was amiss until I looked up at the screen to see that there was an issue.

I realized that in my entire adult life, I have never hit one of those keys intentionally.  Not once.  To the point that I wondered who still used these abominations and why they were still on the keyboard.  I wondered if there was an easy way to disable them.  Google gave me several answers, some of which were very outdated, but one that hit me as an industry standard way was to use AutoHotKey (AHK).

You can read about AHK at their site, but it basically is a little script that runs in the background and intercepts keystrokes, allowing you to do something when a certain hotkey is pressed.  On Windows-P, run some program, let's say.

So I downloaded it and with the following snippets I got from the AHK forums, I disabled both the Insert and the Caps Lock key.

CapsLock::SetCapsLockState, alwaysoff
!CapsLock::SetCapslockState, On

$Insert::return
!Insert::Send, {Insert} ; Alt+Insert toggles 'Insert mode'