CTRL to Caps Lock

I grew up in a household where CTRL has been mapped to Caps Lock on every computer. It was just something I had never questioned until recently. As a heavy CTRL user between Emacs and terminal apps now, I understand.I thought this would be fitting for a first blog post as kind of an origin story.

So I got my first mechanical keyboard about a year and a half ago, and since it's powered by qmk, I decided to replace where caps lock might have been on my planck, to ESC to make Vim and evil a little easier instead of using jk or other ways to switch back to normal mode.

Fast-forward to recently and my mechanical keyboard family has grown with the addition of an ergodox-ez. The default bindings had a lot of keys that with a quick tap was a letter, and a hold became a modifier key. So I thought it might be useful to do this with ESC and CTRL. This is the line to make it happen with qmk.

CTL_T(KC_ESC)

But it wasn't just enough to have it on my keyboards. I needed this magic everywhere.

After mentioning what I had done on the Doom Emacs discord one of them found a guide by Danny Guo to set this up on most systems.

Instructions for Ubuntu however, under gnome tweaks under keyboard, additional layout options, Ctrl position, it was Caps Lock as Ctrl.

I now have ESC/CTRL set to caps lock on keyboards not powered by qmk, such as my laptops built in keyboard.