How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Mark Steward — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:23:08 GMT

Only do this if you definitely want to suppress all balloons. Otherwise Windows 7 might add an extra IME balloon, which you'll swallow against the will of the user. And then we'll have *another* workaround to deal with.

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Mark Steward — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:32:58 GMT

Ignore that, any new balloons should be opt-in...

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

John — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:53:38 GMT

Only do this if you are an idiot.

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Pierre B. — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:28:47 GMT

There is a legitimate use for this: some system don't differentiate between lower-case and upper-case for passwords, mainly as a usability gesture for exactly this same reason.

(And, the system has to work on all Windows revisions or on all OS, so they couldn't rely on the balloon to help users.)

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

James Schend — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:43:17 GMT

Pierre: Those systems are broken, and should be fixed. If they don't allow lowercase/uppercase characters in password, they probably also don't allow punctuation and most likely also have a really short maximum password length (like 8 chars.)

I hate those programs, because, gasp, I actually *want* to use strong passwords. They should let me.

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Maurits — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:02:44 GMT

There are segments of society that live with their Caps Lock key permanently on.

I used to get email from some of them.

But anyway, I could imagine a front end GUI to a system that only accepted numeric passwords (so you could call in from your phone, say). The warning would be superfluous for such a GUI.

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

AsmGuru62 — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:32:58 GMT

All characters are allowed in password - Windows simply friendly reminding that password entered MAY not be a right one.

Also, SubclassWindow macro only subclasses this box and not all boxes in the system.

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

George Jansen — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:58:04 GMT

@James Schwend: Oracle database passwords are case-insensitive. I don't think that with the installed base they're going to switch over to case-sensitive any time soon.

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Todd Berkebile — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:26:16 GMT

Personally I think that Ballon Tooltips for password fields is the coolest feature ever added to Windows. Why someone would need to be insane to disable such an amazing feature! Whoever thought up that UI feature must be a genius. ;)

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Duke of New York — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:36:19 GMT

[There are segments of society that live with their Caps Lock key permanently on. I used to get email from some of them.]

Yeah, they're called "parents."

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Ike — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:29:48 GMT

AsmGuru62 - "Also, SubclassWindow macro only subclasses this box and not all boxes in the system."

Correct, and I have a hard time understanding how people could think otherwise and express that thought without thinking again. They obviously have no experience in Win32-programming.

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

SuperKoko — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 00:46:42 GMT

@James Schend: What about credit card numbers?

That seems to be a legitimate use of ES_PASSWORD.

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Angus — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:49:42 GMT

The balloon I *really* want to suppress is the "You can continue to work while I download your update" one. I know that, I don't need to be reminder for every update. Now, can I have a checkbox that says "don't show this dialog again?"

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Shinobu — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 11:10:37 GMT

I think that the control should convert all characters to uppercase when the balloon gets swallowed. The only good reason to disable the balloon is because your passwords are case insensitive. If you don't remove the case information when the balloon is swallowed, some programmer somewhere will create a case-sensitive password box without warning balloon, yielding frustrated users whose passwords don't work because they didn't get warned about their capslock as expected.

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Dean — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 11:20:46 GMT

Shinobu: How would the control know it's been subclassed to prevent the balloon showing up?

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Ens — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:04:29 GMT

Even if it could tell it was subclassed, I wouldn't want it. What if the password itself you're entering is lowercase or mixed-case? Generally I don't like when changing one little thing changes a bunch of seemingly unrelated styles (see also: the way that the button style on tab controls changes the way that keyboard focus works -- I would have thought it was just a visual change). And anyway, that's got poor localization. Some languages have multiple lowercase letters that map to a single uppercase letter. Making them unconditionally uppercase would reduce the security of such passwords (lowercase-only has similar difficulties).

Maybe the programmer has some other affordance for caps lock -- a status bar or something else. Maybe even their own custom balloon tip that's themed to fit their app (having decided that, for whatever reason, the standard Windows style guidelines do not apply to them -- maybe they want to add a "do not show me again" checkbox to the tooltip like mentioned above). Maybe it's just part of one of those strange shareware minigames (in which case it probably falls under Raymond's "perhaps you want to confuse your user"). Maybe the shift key is broken and you don't want to clue anybody looking over the shoulder into what characters are capitals because you can afford programmer time but not a new keyboard. Hmm...I'm having trouble stretching further than that.

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

steveg — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 01:35:10 GMT

How about some jackass user doing UAT complains about your application behaving differently and refuses to sign the cheque? I've seen that before (with other things), and had to code around it despite protesting "but that's _standard_ behaviour".

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

manicmarc — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 01:36:06 GMT

I could quite see myself omitting the balloon tip for the word "CAPS" next to the text box being shown, as the balloon tip is quite distracting, and too long-winded for what it needs to communicate.

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Steve D — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 01:49:23 GMT

What I want to know is why the option to cancel Caps Lock by pressing shift is no longer available. Am I the only one who likes caps lock to be disabled whenever a shift key is pressed?

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Dean Harding — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 04:36:18 GMT

Steve D: On Vista, go to Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options, then on the Keyboards and Languages tab, click the "Change keyboards..." button. Then, on the Advanced Key Settings tab, under "To turn off Caps Lock" check "Press the SHIFT key".

It's pretty buried and non-intuitive, but the option is there. I'm pretty sure it was always off by default, as well...

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Wound — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 11:34:53 GMT

But what if I have a password where I WANT everything to be in caps? For a time I did, and hitting caps lock as the first and last key strokes was effectively part of my password. It would disguise what I was typing from anyone watching, but the giant balloon gave away the secret, besides being utterly annoying.

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

JM — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:18:19 GMT

I answered this question once in the same way, but I added that you probably don't want to do this even if your system uses case-insensitive passwords. It's just a good idea to drill it into users that passwords are case-sensitive, and just because you've got one of those 70s holodover systems where they're not doesn't mean that suppressing the message is a good idea. Just pretend passwords *are* case-sensitive; if enough people believe it and act like it you've got a better chance of making it a reality some day.

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Curious Observer — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:26:55 GMT

@Wound-Most keyboards I've seen have a LED indicator that lights up when you press CAPS. How did you get around that? If someone really wanted your password that wouldn't be too difficult to notice. I guess there is always tape. :-)

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Worf — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:38:30 GMT

@Curious Observer: That LED is software controlled - it in no way indicates the true status of caps lock - just what software believes it to be.

There is software out there that lets you blink whatever you want on those LEDs...

re: How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

Larry Lard — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:33:26 GMT

I don't even want to *think* about what happens to case-insensitive-password systems in Turkey.