Strange CapsLock behavior

[Kristopher Micinski]

All,

I have a number of keyboards that do this, and I was hoping that some of you can enlighten me.  I regularly (as I assume many of you do) remap CapsLock and Cntrl for better emacs usage.  This works great, and since I started doing it years ago, I've grown accustomed to it and could never switch back!  However, on my older keyboards (my Model M and Kinesis do this) I notice a strange problem: when I hold down caps lock for a while, tap a key, and then go back to tap another key, caps lock will have become unpressed.  This is probably behavior in hardware, because my modern mechanical keyboards don't do this, and I can see some rationale for it..  This is super annoying, however, when I use emacs for a while, hover over some code wondering what to do, and then want to continue on; I have to lift my finger off CapsLock and push it again, resulting in frequent error.  I googled around to see what this is, and I also tried searching this forum, but I can't think of a name for this behavior (maybe it's standard..).  Does anyone know what this is, and what causes it?  (I assume it's something that I can't fix without different firmware, but whatever, I'm just interested as to why it's like this..)

Kris

[asdf]

My guess is it's because the keyboards don't have nkeyrollover

[Soarer]

Well, he said HOLD caps AND tap another key, but that should be fine with any keys on a Model M.

Kris, are you using a PS/2 - USB adapter with the older 'boards?

[Kristopher Micinski]

Ah, yes I am!  How silly of me not to have recognized that this could have been the issue :-/

[Kristopher Micinski]

Right.  A little quick reading reveals that this is most probably the fact that I've been using a dumb ps2 to usb adapter, rather a proper converter which actually interprets and changes the signal.  I've ordered a more proper converter and it should be coming in the mail soon enough!  Thanks for pointing me at the likely cause!

[Soarer]

Well, it must've been not entirely dumb, for it to work at all! But, yeah, some are definately better than others, and the Model M is quite fussy about which it wants to work well with.

[Soarer]

We've tried to catalog them, but some makers change the insides from time to time, so it's hard to keep track.

[Kristopher Micinski]

That's right, mine was the second one down on the list, which has the noted issue:

- Protocol issue; when holding down a key, then hitting another key, the first key is no longer sent

I'm suspecting that exactly this was causing the problem, I guess both of the adapters I've used have been these :-/

[Soarer]

Right, that's pretty suspicious :-)

I gave up on them and wrote my own (I wanted to be able to adapt some less mainstream keyboards), but still, there's one or two standard-looking PS/2 keyboards it can't handle.

[Soarer]

Blue Cube solves the world's problems.

Nothing does that! It does work well with a Model M though. If you can find one.