Mac OS X: Disable the Caps Lock Key
Contributed by qmchenry 
Tagged: Apple Mac I never use the caps lock key (at least the way it’s meant to be used). Instead, my left pinkie finger triggers it a few times a day. My right hand takes issue with this since it’s the one that has to delete the capitalized characters, some of which it had to type. This quick fix will disable the caps lock key and mend some fences between your hands.
Open System Preferences and select the Keyboard & Mouse pane. Within here, click the Keyboard tab and then the Modifier Keys… button at the bottom.
A small window will open on top of the system preferences. In this are four modifier keys (Caps Lock, Control, Option, and Command) and a pulldown for each. To disable the Caps Lock key, pull down the associated menu and select No Action. It is also possible to swap the functions of these modifier keys (if you have a funky keyboard or are just feeling mean).
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Ted Johnson said on April 24, 2009
tHANK yOU SO mUCH!!!
Anonymous said on August 31, 2009
They broke this is Snow Leopard for USB keyboards. That sysprefs pane does absolutely nothing in Snow Leopard.
Brad said on September 21, 2009
I agree. Although mine is strange cause I had caps-lock disabled in 10.5.8. After the upgrade, it’s till disabled, but I can’t turn it back on for the external keyboard (Aluminum). The caps-lock setting in that syspref pane works fine for the Macbook Pro 15″ unibody keyboard.
Rob said on November 2, 2009
No love for disabling the caps lock in Snow Leopard with full USB keyboard, it does work with the newer compact USB keyboard, strange.
Tim Lossen said on January 2, 2010
cool! caps lock was driving me crazy …
Iso Grifo said on January 21, 2010
Disabling the caps lock seems a bit extreme to me. Check out CapSee… it puts a notification bezel on the screen (just like the volume and brightness bezels) letting you know when you bump the caps lock key. It’s free, and it’s currently Apple’s featured download! http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/capsee.html
Anonymous said on January 21, 2010
Note: you may have a pull-down list of keyboards … be sure you’re modifying
the keyboard you think you’re modifying :)
(BTW, works fine for me with Snow Leopard after I selected the correct
keyboard.)
The reason it’s important to check the keyboard is that the Mac OS remembers
other keyboards you’ve attached, and doesn’t seem to default to the one that
*is* attached (when you’ve got only one currently attached).
W Mellon said on April 11, 2010
Caps Lock is a relic of PowerPoint zombies. A totally unnecessary function, in the rare cases somebody might need it, some obscure key-combination could do the job. Too bad is hogs so much keyboard real estate.
Wouter said on September 9, 2010
Excellent! Thanks.
Ordell Robbie said on December 12, 2010
Wow, that was easy. Thanks!
meridianmarc said on April 7, 2011
f*ck yea … thanks for this dude. just broke my pinky finger, which is now splinted (and has a strong affinity for capital letters). the other nine fingers FTW
David Kirk - Founder/Editor said on April 7, 2011
Broke my ring-finger playing football in high school. I would be trying to code and suddenly notice a long string of L’s and semi-colons. btw, those splints stink after a few days, literally.
Hope said on January 27, 2012
Does anyone know a way to disable Caps Lock for every user in a lab? I can disable it on each computer for each user, but I have hundreds of users coming in here. Nothing is more annoying right now than reading assignments in all caps and I have spent months telling them not to use the key, but many still do.