4 ms·

Remapping the "caps lock" key to ESC has worked out really well for me.

by tedivm 8y ago

procinct 8y ago
I don’t have a touch bar but I do this too. I have it mapped to escape when pressed on its own and Ctrl when pressed with another key and that works great.
- esmi 8y ago
  This is really interesting. Did you have to do anything special to make it work in OSX?
  - procinct 8y ago
    Yeah, install Karabiner Elements. It's a handy tool that will let you do a lot of keyboard customization.
sjwright 8y ago
And to be fair to Apple, they make this remapping super-easy to do. No hacks, weirdness or third party tools are required.
- wudu 8y ago
  Only if you want to remap to Esc. My preference is to set it as Delete. That I can not do w/o 3rd party apps.
zumu 8y ago
Me too. I really hope this catches on.
copperx 8y ago
It makes no sense to remap a home row key to such an infrequently used key. It's much better to remap Caps Lock to Control (by the way, how do you press Control A and Control E and Control L and Control R hundreds of times a day in bash? By reaching to the far away corner located Control? That's absolute madness). Traditional UNIX keyboards had the control key in the position of where the caps lock key is now. If you remap your keyboard like that, bash and the Emacs shortcuts enabled throughout macOS will suddenly make A LOT of sense. After a few days it will seem be impossible to work in any other keyboard, which is further proof that the remapping is essential for working efficiently in a Unix environment. I would personally remap the far away control key to act like an Escape key instead. Sure, if you're a vi user, the caps lock as ESC will seem rational at first, but outside of vi, all other Unix tools work with control key combinations.
- __blockcipher__ 8y ago
  Map it to both. Single tap is escape, hold is ctrl. https://github.com/jasonrudolph/keyboard https://github.com/jasonrudolph/keyboard It works super well. I can hit key combos that would normally be tricky super easily. Now if only I could find a way to standardize my hotkeys across sublime, chrome, vim, terminal and tmux. I’ve gotten close but not where I want to. (As an aside, does anyone know how to make ctrl+w delete the word left to the cursor in chrome and put it in the buffer like in the terminal (and also do the same for subl)?)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- philwelch 8y ago
  > It makes no sense to remap a home row key to such an infrequently used key. 1. Having never used caps lock in years, I think any remap is an improvement. 2. I'm guessing you don't use Vim ;) For me, esc is one of my most frequently used keys.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    > Having never used caps lock in years THAT KEY HAS A LOT TO ANSWER FOR
- torstenvl 8y ago
  This is exactly what I've done. CapsLock -> Ctrl, Ctrl -> ESC. It actually improves the ergonomics of bringing up the Force Quit dialog (my primary use of the ESC key, since I'm not a vi user). I do this even though I don't currently have a TouchBar model.
- cerberusss 8y ago
  > Traditional UNIX keyboards had the control key in the position of where the caps lock key is now Couterpoint: when I was working at Lucent around 1999, they gave me a Sun workstation with a keyboard that had Esc instead of Caps Lock. There were others that had a Control key there, though. Edit: I'm searching online and can't find a Sun keyboard with that layout. Now I'm wondering if I misremembered...

Remapping the "caps lock" key to ESC has worked out really well for me.

by tedivm 8y ago

Remapping the "caps lock" key to ESC has worked out really well for me.

I don’t have a touch bar but I do this too. I have it mapped to escape when pressed on its own and Ctrl when pressed with another key and that works great.

esmi 8y ago
This is really interesting. Did you have to do anything special to make it work in OSX?
- procinct 8y ago
  Yeah, install Karabiner Elements. It's a handy tool that will let you do a lot of keyboard customization.

sjwright 8y ago

And to be fair to Apple, they make this remapping super-easy to do. No hacks, weirdness or third party tools are required.

wudu 8y ago
Only if you want to remap to Esc. My preference is to set it as Delete. That I can not do w/o 3rd party apps.

zumu 8y ago

Me too. I really hope this catches on.

copperx 8y ago

It makes no sense to remap a home row key to such an infrequently used key. It's much better to remap Caps Lock to Control (by the way, how do you press Control A and Control E and Control L and Control R hundreds of times a day in bash? By reaching to the far away corner located Control? That's absolute madness). Traditional UNIX keyboards had the control key in the position of where the caps lock key is now. If you remap your keyboard like that, bash and the Emacs shortcuts enabled throughout macOS will suddenly make A LOT of sense. After a few days it will seem be impossible to work in any other keyboard, which is further proof that the remapping is essential for working efficiently in a Unix environment. I would personally remap the far away control key to act like an Escape key instead. Sure, if you're a vi user, the caps lock as ESC will seem rational at first, but outside of vi, all other Unix tools work with control key combinations.

__blockcipher__ 8y ago
Map it to both. Single tap is escape, hold is ctrl. https://github.com/jasonrudolph/keyboard https://github.com/jasonrudolph/keyboard It works super well. I can hit key combos that would normally be tricky super easily. Now if only I could find a way to standardize my hotkeys across sublime, chrome, vim, terminal and tmux. I’ve gotten close but not where I want to. (As an aside, does anyone know how to make ctrl+w delete the word left to the cursor in chrome and put it in the buffer like in the terminal (and also do the same for subl)?)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
philwelch 8y ago
> It makes no sense to remap a home row key to such an infrequently used key. 1. Having never used caps lock in years, I think any remap is an improvement. 2. I'm guessing you don't use Vim ;) For me, esc is one of my most frequently used keys.
- sjwright 8y ago
  > Having never used caps lock in years THAT KEY HAS A LOT TO ANSWER FOR
torstenvl 8y ago
This is exactly what I've done. CapsLock -> Ctrl, Ctrl -> ESC. It actually improves the ergonomics of bringing up the Force Quit dialog (my primary use of the ESC key, since I'm not a vi user). I do this even though I don't currently have a TouchBar model.
cerberusss 8y ago
> Traditional UNIX keyboards had the control key in the position of where the caps lock key is now Couterpoint: when I was working at Lucent around 1999, they gave me a Sun workstation with a keyboard that had Esc instead of Caps Lock. There were others that had a Control key there, though. Edit: I'm searching online and can't find a Sun keyboard with that layout. Now I'm wondering if I misremembered...