Almost everything else is indicated on the screen. Why aren’t these indicators shown on the taskbar or menu bar instead?
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Why bother designing and coding an entire GUI element to indicate something that’s just as successfully expressed by a single LED? If it’s not broke, et cetera and so forth.
Think of the number of people every day who have trouble entering passwords because they forget their capslock key is on. And that’s *with* the light. Taking that away would cause even more confusion.
Some software provides a visual indicator that the capslock key is on when typing in a text field. But you can’t rely on that being there.
Historical reasons.
It used to be like that in the past – before computers even had proper screens, really.
Why not change it?
Well, the better question is *why* change it? The current trend is quite the opposite: we stuff more and more stuff onto the keyboards. Programmable RGB LED illumination, tiny LCD screens, programmable macro keys, even *full feature touch displays*, though I heard newer Macbooks are ditching that. Why remove the poor status LEDs from their rightful historical place specifically?
They didn’t always have screen indicators.
Back in the day a terminal was 80 characters wide and 25 characters high. You already lost lines when you had any kind of TUI (Text User Interface), so you really didn’t want to give up more real estate than necessary.
Also, I can’t find the documentation for it, but I remember that on really old models, the logic of the Lock keys were actually handled in the keyboard circuitry and not at the PC level, but someone may need to confirm?
Some software for keyboards does have screen notifications too. Personally I turn it off because I don’t want a huge overlay informing me that CAPS lock is on
These things are a function of the keyboard itself, not the computer. So the keyboard is showing its status.
Well when you get kidnapped by the bad guys and they give you a laptop to decode some password for them how are you gonna program a secret email program that only communicates to the user by blinking the caps lock key in Morse code so they can’t use screen mirroring and/or van Eck phreaking to keep an eye on what you’re doing so you can call for help and escape and then find that lost cache of Japanese war gold?
Because they need to work regardless of what machine they’re plugged into. Not everything is a Windows desktop machine.
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