As I learn more and more keyboard short cuts, the ctrl key has become more and more useful. Unfortunately, it’s located in the most awkward place on the keyboard.
The capslock key on the other hand is the most useless key on the keyboard (for someone who doesn’t like shouting on the Internet), yet it’s located at one of the most convenient places.
Wouldn’t it be nice to make the capslock key act like another ctrl key?
Here’s how to do it on linux running X
/usr/bin/setxkbmap -option “ctrl:nocaps”
You can do this almost as easily on windows as well, and I’ll post up how when I next use windows.
Another way is using xmodmap
Make a file (call it caps2ctrl) with the following:
clear lockadd control = Caps_Lock
run
xmodmap caps2ctrl
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This is cool but you really want to put it in the ‘.xmodmap’ file so that it automatically runs on startup. For example, here is my .xmodmap file that swaps backspace and capslock around:
robert@Shhnap:~ $ cat .xmodmap
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
keycode 0×16 = Caps_Lock
keycode 0×42 = BackSpace
add Lock = Caps_Lock