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Also as a vim user I would like the esc instead of the control here but that is non Unix standard as far as I know. I also use Windows quite a lot so having the \ somewhere close is nice to have.

Though I really dislike the meta key next to the space-bar but that is just me not being old enough to have used non IBM compatible keyboards.

As you might have noticed, everybody's preference is different.

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There are many ways to rebind caps lock to be escape on press and control when used in combination with another key. Karbiner elements on macos and xcape on Linux come to mind immediately. But some keyboard firmwares are programmable enough to do it themselves too.

However. What I found best as a vim user was to use ^[ as escape. It has the added bonus of actually being faster to process by vim too.

You don't need any extra software to map Caps to Esc on X11: Just enable the caps:escape option.

In context: https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/6c4478...

You can also use xmodmap [1].

My xmodmap file has things like:

  ! Make Caps Lock be Escape and Scroll Lock be Caps Lock
  remove Lock = Caps_Lock
  keysym Caps_Lock = Escape
  remove Lock = Scroll_Lock
  keysym Scroll_Lock = Caps_Lock
  add Lock = Caps_Lock

After reading this post, I also reverted backspace and bar/backslash:

  keysym BackSpace = backslash bar
  keysym backslash = BackSpace

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xmodmap

EDIT: xmodmap link

XKB options have the advantage of also being understood by Wayland compositors.

Yeah. That’s cool, but I’m talking about conditional context switching.

ESC if pressed once.

CTRL it pressed with another key.

This is the sort of thing I'd want to modify the keyboard firmware for. QMK has explicit support for this kind of thing, for example: https://docs.qmk.fm/#/feature_advanced_keycodes?id=mod-tap

You can also use ^[ as escape, which on this keyboard is a very small motion away from the home row.

With Shift mapped to Escape, sure.

As another Vim guy, the ctrl key being so much closer makes ctrl-[ a little more appealing.

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