From Vim Tips Wiki

Tip 1083 Previous Next Created: December 23, 2005 Complexity: basic Author: Ralf Holly Version: 5.7

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 TO DO 

• Merge info from comments to some relevant place.
• The original tip (now removed) used a registry file to remap CapsLock to Esc. The file was wrong (it used "ControlSet001" instead of "CurrentControlSet"), and was a duplicate of VimTip75.

[edit] Comments

In Linux, you can change the keyboard-layout using a tool called xmodmap.

Write the following line into a file (e.g. ~/.xmodmap-esc)

clear Lock
keycode 0x42 = Escape

and load it by running

xmodmap ~/.xmodmap-esc

or you can just run

xmodmap -e 'clear Lock' -e 'keycode 0x42 = Escape'

in your X start up file.

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I know how to turn caps off in Tiger (or turn it into a Ctrl key):

• Open System Preferences
• Goto Keyboard & Mouse
• At the bottom of the panel there is a "Modifier Keys..." button, click it
• Choose "No Action" or "^ ctrl" for caps-lock

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For Panther one can look at uControl (http://gnufoo.org/ucontrol/ucontrol.html).

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On any X windows implementation you can use:

xmodmap -e 'keycode 66 = Control_L'
xmodmap -e 'clear Lock'
xmodmap -e 'add Control = Control_L'

to make your caps lock work as control, like on Sun keyboards. Which is a little easier to use IMHO.

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For X11, it's convenient to use this xkb configuration:

Option "XkbOptions" "grp:alt_shift_toggle,ctrl:nocaps,grp_led:scroll"

ctrl:nocaps is the trick.

This is for mapping caps lock to control, of course. Then use ctrl-[ to send escape.

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