Mapping CapsLock to Esc or Control

If you use VIM you know pain of pressing ESC button. Your pinky finger needs to stretch a lot. In this post I’ll try to remove the burden of your pinky finger.I’ll show you ways to map your Caps as ESC when pressed alone but, when pressed with other keys like a will it will be registered as Control. To make long story short when you press Caps you will register ESC key and when you press Caps + a you will register Ctrl + a.

For this to work we are going to use xcape

You can install the xcape with the instruction provided. After following the instruction type

which xcape

# OUTPUT
/usr/bin/xcape

If it shows you the path then you are all good to go.

Follow the instruction below

• Copy your xcape executable to your $PATH

• Add the following snippet to you ~/.profile

setxkbmap -option `ctrl:nocaps`
xcape -e 'Caps_Lock=Escape;Control_L=Escape;Control_R=Escape'

• Restart your machine and you should be good to go.

Sometime above instructions doesn’t work if above instruction doesn’t work for you, Here’s another way to configure keys

• Edit /etc/default/keyboard( sudo vim /etc/default/keyboard)

• On XKBOPTIONS add ctrl:nocaps. If your XKBOPTIONS are not empty you can append options with ;.

• Add

xcape -e 'Caps_Lock=Escape;Control_L=Escape;Control_R=Escape'

• Run

sudo dkpg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

Now you should be good to go. Let me know if this worked for you.