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.