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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

I resolved this pain by making the Caps Lock key work as it should: tap for “Esc” and hold for “Control”. Then I took the Escape key and made it Caps Lock—it’s occasionally useful, but not nearly enough to warrant a home row position.

You can do this with Karaniner Elements on macOS. There’s a way to do it on Windows too, but how escapes me at the moment.

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On macOS you can do this using just the stock OS. It's under keyboard settings. You can also do this on iOS, it's awesome if you have a physical keyboard and like to use vim on your iPad

I don’t know what’s cooler. This setting in MacOS / iOS or having a dedicated foot pedal to press “i” or “esc”

You can do the simple remapping. The “tap for escape, hold for control” takes additional software.

Here's a summary on how to do it on the respective OS's https://gist.github.com/tanyuan/55bca522bf50363ae4573d4bdcf0...

It's an interesting concept. I have been using capslock as control for so long that I don't know I could get used to this though.

To be clear, that link shows how to use extra software to do it in each OS including Karabiner on macOS.

Tried that some years back. Or the simpler version where it is just Control. Didn’t work I found out because I was using my pinky to activate a very common modifier key. It was uncomfortable. I ended up remapping caps lock to Ctrl-C.

I just use the good old control keys now. Either by using my palm or (more commonly for the left one) the last knuckle of my pinky finger.

You can do this in QMK too if you have a custom mechanical keyboard. It'll work regardless of machine or os then.

I think a custom mechanical keyboard is going to be much nicer than a foot pedal.

Though, I'd encourage a custom keyboard where the thumb can reach 2-3 keys each (instead of only really being able to hit the spacebar). That way, you can put Esc on a thumb key. -- e.g. ZSA's moonlander or planck ez are nice.

Or switch to a sun keyboard where this was the native layout

I feel like people who think the "CTRL" key goes on the home row never pressed CTRL+Z, CTRL+X, CTRL+C or CTRL+V in their entire lives.

Makes zero sense ergonomically to put the CTRL key on the home row.

I tried it for about 0.05 seconds and after pressing CTRL+Z one time I knew it was not a good idea for me. pinky finger does not like pressing a key while being on a higher row than another finger also pressing a key. painful.

I'm not a programmer, mostly do CAD / CAM and general construction business whatever.

I remapped capslock to delete, and shift-capslock to capslock for the rare occasion I want to yell at my future self.

thats becauze ctrl z/x/c/v aren't used for copy paste if you're using vim or emacs.

Now if only other programs would agree (e.g. web browser)

there are a lot more programs in use today than vim or emacs.

That is simple. Just keep your control key and map caps lock to control also. That way you are never out of control.

My fix for this is to also remap holding the Enter key to right control.

That way I can use the "control" key on the opposite side of the alpha key, the same way one is meant to do with the shift key when touch typing.

I just naturally used my ring or middle finger to press capslock in those cases. If you like the idea, then maybe stick with it longer than <1 sec. ;)

<1 sec was enough.

Switching ESC to Caps Lock took significantly less time to retrain muscle memory than I expected.

I think AutoHotkey would be the program to use on Windows?

I’d recommend Power Toys for that. AHK is cool but better for scripts and automations. Power Toys has lots of other neat functions and support by MS.

I found power toys didn't work too well, especially when you want to turn it off and on, or put exceptions for some programs

I just have a simple autohotkey script + vim like keys for going up and down in textboxes/selection/dropdowns.

  <!k::Send {Up}
  <!j::Send {Down}
  Capslock::Esc

Only downside is the mess that happens when on other machines that don't have that, also try to use ^[ as much as possible.

AutoHotKey scripts can be compiled in to portable executables.

For a simpler solution I can recommend https://github.com/randyrants/sharpkeys. Of course AHK is great tool for all kinds of more advanced customizations.

<C-[> is a native remap to Esc btw

But it doesn’t work globally in the OS. It’s nice to casually mash capslock as esc to get out of modals and such all over the OS, even in games.

I did the same thing, but also mapped Caps Lock to Cmd+Shift+Ctrl+Option (so-called Super key) when it's pressed together with another key. Useful for application switching and other custom stuff.

https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/plugins/caps2esc

Works great in Windows and Linux.

For a more general solution, I prefer https://github.com/randyrants/sharpkeys on Windows.

I already had my caps-lock as backspace so I settled on using single quote as ESC. It works great except when I need to use a lot of single quotes of course.

For Windows 10 people: Microsoft PowerToys has a "remap keys" function within the Keyboard Manager. It's very convenient and easy to use.

I've tried this, it sometimes doesn't seem to intercept the key in time, so funny things happen. Others, the key gets "stuck".

I've tried modifying the Super / Win key. It would often happen that the keyboard would become unusable and behave like if it had the Win key stuck, even though it was remapped to something else.

This actually happened on Windows 11, not 10 (never tried on that). I don't know if it makes a difference.

Karabiner elements*

I did and still comfortable with the following YMMV. Alt -> Ctrl Ctrl -> Alt Caps -> Esc Esc -> Caps

Kmonad for Linux

I wonder how to do that with .Xmodmap

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