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Comment by huebnerob | Hacker News Reader

I started remapping the Caps Lock key to the Escape command when I got my tbMBP, and now it's the very first thing I do on every single computer I start using, touch bar or not. MacOS even now offers this as a 1st party option in system preferences, it works phenomenally. I even love, at a visceral level, the balanced symmetry of ESC and ENTER being opposite each other.

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You can make the Caps Lock key even more useful by turning it into a "Hyper" modifier (Command+Ctrl+Option+Shift) when it is held down (great for system-wide shortcuts in Hammerspoon[0], since application shortcuts that use all four modifiers are very rare) but acts like pressing "Escape" when it is tapped.

This is easily done with Karabiner Elements[1] and a simple rule[2] you import and enable.

[0] http://www.hammerspoon.org

[1] https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements

[2] https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/complex_modifications/#caps_l...

Do you happen to know how to do that on a linux machine running X? I'm afraid to dive back into the xkb rule hell-hole to figure it out myself.

setxkbmap -option 'caps:ctrl_modifier'

handles part of it and

xcape -e 'Caps_Lock=Escape'

does the rest. xcape is in the ubuntu repos, for fedora there's a copr (dawid/xcape).

Thanks, I'll check out xcape.

Try xcape

you don't need xcape as others have suggested, setxkbmap -option caps:escape does it with just xkbmap.

If you're a Vimmer this is invaluable. ctrl-c and esc feel terrible after that.

I'm hesitant to do this for portability reasons, but it really would be a great method. Instead, I have some stuff in my .vimrc, which is a lot easier to port over than a key-remap.

I get bye with capslock remapped as control and using ctrl-[, which is the pinky of each hand and requires minimal movement. Control in general is useful for everything, escape not as often.

Ctrl-C is another option that works the same as Escape and is easier to activate with one hand.

I both knew this and read the post I was responding to, which also brings this up as an option. I commented about Ctrl-[ because it was the last previously-unmentioned option.

My bad. I didn't even catch that "ctrl-c" was mentioned in the parent!

Not quite. If you want to append or insert characters using blockwise visual mode in vim, it won't work with Ctrl-C. It will work with Ctrl-[ or Esc.

That's true for the default behaviour. Ctrl-C also won't call autocommands (like InsertLeave).

But - you can always map <C-c> to <ESC>, so that it'll work exactly the same.

I use "imap zz <ESC>" . ZZ is already save and quit so it feels quit natural.

> I started remapping the Caps Lock key to the Escape command

I could't care less about this, but...

> even love, at a visceral level, the balanced symmetry of ESC and ENTER being opposite each other.

now that you mentioned it, I absolutely HAVE to do it!

Same, but I always remap Caps Lock to Control since I use the emacs keybindings. Using other people's laptops is really disorienting now, but worth it :)

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