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Comment by josho | Hacker News Reader

The Touch Bar was what finally pushed me over the edge to remap caps lock to escape. I'm shocked at how much I enjoy ESC being close to the home row (I'm not even a big vim user). For this change alone I am glad to have the Touch Bar.

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I use caps lock as control. It would be hard to relearn that muscle memory.

I've done this for years and keep typical a capital C every time I try to copy something or send a break in a terminal when I use someone else's machine.

More people need to map Caps Lock to Control. It just makes sense, and it's where control use to be on many old Sun keyboards.

As an old Sun keyboard user, Caps Lock as Control feels right. That's also where it is on my HHKB keyboard.

As a vim user, escape is too high up on most modern keyboards anyway. The ADM-3A terminal vi was invented on placed it to the left of the Q key, which was a lot easier to reach. HHKB puts it where the tilde key traditionally is, which is pretty close to the original intent of vi.

Remapping tilde on touchbar MacBook Pros would be a good solution, if there was an obvious other place to put tilde/backtick.

Not just terminals and UNIX workstation keyboards--Apple's very first keyboard on the Apple II. (I don't think Apple shipped a keyboard with the Apple I.) Of course it helped that there was no lower case, obviating the need for Caps Lock, and who needs Tab, but there were Shift keys.

> As an old Sun keyboard user

I've been used to the control key in that position since about 1980:

http://www.hp9845.net/9845/history/comparison/images/closeup...

During the 80s there was such a plethora of keyboard variants, I learned never to trust where ESC would be; you can use control-[ on most keyboards to generate the same key. When the MacBookPro went useless for ESC, my muscle memory just switched over. (This is somewhat conditional on control being next to 'A', which is the only place it should ever be!)

You could have both, I've never needed to hold down escape or tap control.

That said, I've had caps lock bound to backspace for years, so I'm not advocating for something I do myself.

I do both. Press and release = escape; press and hold = control.

Oh that's neat. I guess you use Karabiner?

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/132564/how-can-i-r...

Yep!

Same. That plus the realization that you can adjust volume or screen brightness by holding the brightness/volume button and then simply sliding left or right made it actually intuitively usable. It's still a little gimmicky and probably not worth the effort.

I've had my Caps Lock key mapped to 'delete word' after having it mapped to several other things while trying to combat RSI and am loving it. Great for both writing/editing prose as well as code.

Vim user, I did the same. I do prefer the caps lock placement too since I’m doing it so often. But it still makes the TouchBar a total waste of space (and it adds cost)

That is a bit of twisted logic. It does not say anything positive about touchbar, but conflates a negative in a somewhat dishonest way and ignores the core of this topic, that it is now compulsory. For instance, prison has forced people to change their life for the better, but that does not logically lead to "I am glad to have prison (compulsory for everyone)"

Ah! Thats what I might do... At work we just have Bluetooth keyboards so its not as annoying to us thankfully since the Magic Keyboard has all the keys and the keys dont suck as much. I make too many typos on the new MBP keyboards I never made on a previous Mac.

How to do this?

System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys button on the bottom right

click the "Caps Lock" dropdown and set to escape

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