[…] – I mentioned this tool back when we discussed the useless keyboard keys. It is by far the easiest and hassle free utility to re-map keys on […]

I’ve had caps lock remapped to a second ‘A’ key before, when I was on a keyboard that made it particularly easy to tap by accident when I was reaching for A… might need to look into this “conveniently place ESC key” business for work though.

The way I use the pause/break key is a bit of a pun. I play music using MPD (Music Player Daemon), so I have the Pause key send a command to MPD to toggle playback. That way I can instantly interrupt my music when someone starts talking to me.

There is no built-in tools in Windows, but one could download Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator from Microsoft.

Ever wanted to quickly and easily define your own keyboard layout for a language Microsoft doesn’t support? Or define your own keyboard layout so you can quickly and easily enter your favorite symbols with a simple keystroke? Have the keyboard work on 64-bit platforms, or make use of custom locales in Windows 7 to provide new language names? Well, want no more: the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator is here!

Create new keyboard layouts from scratch
Base a new layout on an existing one
Modify an existing keyboard layout and build a new layout from it
Multilingual input locales within edit control fields
Build keyboard layout DLLs for x86, x64, and IA64 platforms
Package the resulting keyboard layouts for subsequent delivery and installation

Caps lock remapped to Esc defiantly.
Runner up on my 2010 macbook is the dashboard key I can’t remap to notification center… (like anyone ever used dashboard…)

Please don’t get rid of my caps lock! As a drafter, where I HAVE to use all capitals for most text, I would be lost without it. Or, more likely, I’d end up permanently enabling caps-lock in some way that was a PITA to disable, and would never use lowercase again. You’ve been warned! :p

CAPS LOCK, totally. I’ve had it remapped to an additional COMMAND key for years. Old school; started out with keyboards that had CTRL to the left of the A, where it belongs. (Anyone else remember Wordstar…?)

I quite like CAPS LOCK and would like it to stay. This is because I only ever type with my left hand, so holding down SHIFT for more than a character or two gets… inconvenient. To me the most useless key is INSERT. I have never in my life pressed it on purpose, except to undo what happened after pressing it accidentally.

@ Mihai:
I thought about such a usage of CAPSLOCK during an occasional meeting with a lot of SQL, but finally I got that “typing capitals without shift” simply breaks my brains somehow. That’s like to come back to standard layout from Dvorak’s one: seems to be quite evident plus all the buttons are subscribed, but…

Unfortunately on the MacBook there are not *enough* keys. (Delete I miss the most, followed by Insert)
Probably the least used key is the “Eject” one, but that’s just because I don’t use the optical drive so much nowadays.
As for Caps Lock – I use it for typing long constant names, such as X_OUT_OF_RANGE which I need quite frequently.
I don’t have a problem with Control being in a corner – it’s quite within easy reach by my thumb on this keyboard; on full size ones where it really is in a corner I used to press it with the palm/inner knuckle (is that construction right?) of my left pinky.
Regarding that “prime keyboard real estate” – it was there as a mechanical lock for the shift key below on real typewriters :). By the way, on some old keyboards it’s a toggle switch (it remains physically depressed).