I never use Caps Lock, so I disable the Caps Lock key completely with xmodmap, to avoid hitting it by accident.
Occasionally my X server gets into caps-lock state anyway. (Usually some complicated stunt was involved, like attaching x11vnc to the display remotely.) And then I can't turn it off again using the Caps Lock key.
So I wrote a tiny X client that lets me type 'xcapslock off' at a shell prompt …
… and then I had to make an alias to it, called 'XCAPSLOCK OFF'.
@simontatham I have this for numlock but I'm not entirely sure of what it does:
xmodmap -e 'keycode 77 = NoSymbol Num_Lock'
I didn't try caps lock yet, does it not have a keycode, or would it just be confused about shift?
@pulkomandy aha, nice! Generally 'keycode K = a b c d' means that K generates symbol a unshifted, b shifted, and I think c with AltGr and d with both modifiers.
xmodmap -e 'keycode 66 = NoSymbol Caps_Lock' is the Caps Lock equivalent of your Num Lock line. So I was wrong (or perhaps '25% wrong' :-). You _can_ do it with plain xmodmap.
@Lalufu I must admit that I also cling to an old-fashioned idea that computers are still multi-user. Even my personal ones: I have been known to give other people accounts on them, and when those people use their accounts, they _don't_ want the effects of bizarre things like this intended for just me.
So I still think it makes more sense to put my preferences in my account, not systemwide. This is also a reason I haven't taken the Caps Lock keycap off.
@Lalufu though admittedly one flaw in this concept is the login screen. If I have a preferred keyboard layout that's not the systemwide one, I'd like to use it to type my password – especially since I'll _also_ sometimes need to type my password after logging in, and it's doubly annoying to do it in two different finger shapes!
I don't know if any login-screen software temporarily enables each user's keyboard preferences for their password prompt. Or even if it _could_, securely.
@simontatham @Lalufu I finally gave up on the whole "even my PC is multi-user" on the latest install, and it's such a nice experience. I highly recommend it, if you can. I still have a shortcut to map my keyboard back to querty, for when someone needs to type something, but I'm not setting up any accounts.
MS Windows switches layout for different users. I would be surprised if there aren't one like it available for other OSs too, but I never checked.
@simontatham Just start all your terminals with `stty iuclc`.
(A joke.)
@simontatham I may have some aliases along those lines.
alias nordconnect="nordvpn connect"
@simontatham interesting, I’ve never seen that in over 20 capslockless years… but I don’t attach x11vnc.
If you just need "a" remote seesion but not necessarily attach to th currently running session, I can recommend xrdp+xorgxrdp on the server side, and rdesktop or some other RDP client to connect. It also has keymap issues, but slight (basically, I need to revert to the default US layout without my customisations outside if I want to use similar xmodmap effects inside, and inside it uses the older XFree86 / pre-evdev Xorg keycodes).
@simontatham I actually use and like to have Caps Lock.
But I believe the Debian installer still contains a change I made when I discovered that the Brazilian Portuguese keyboard layout has 106 keys, and / is on the 106th key - so I had to be able to switch out of it manually without needing to type any absolute paths!
@simontatham I was going to suggest the built-in xkbmap option to turn LShift+RShift into Caps for such situations (as I usually run with -option compose:caps, it goes well with -option shift:both_capslock)...
Something else, vaguely similar, used to happen for me when I was doing nested RDP connections from Linux – FreeRDP into a VM host, then console into a VM – the X server would sometimes get stuck thinking a nonexistent /Shift/ key was pressed, just from watching a VM boot. What really made it weird is that it wasn't in Caps mode, as even holding physical Shift wouldn't return to lowercase (as normally would with Caps + Shift); it was as if I had a third Shift key stuck.
I could never figure out any any way to undo that, short of restarting the entire X server. Perhaps fortunately, Xwayland seems to be more resilient to that (and less impactful to restart anyway).
@simontatham I usually xmodmap Caps Lock to ctrl. Which has way better ergonomics.
Though you will still need a tool like you describe.
@simontatham I map caps lock to escape and escape to caps lock. I'm never hitting the escape key by accident.
It's obviously great for vim, but even better for StarCraft.
@simontatham My favorite use for caps lock is what the Neo2 keyboard layout uses it for: A modifier key, that when pressed maps “programming characters” like ( [ { to the home row for ergonomic typing.
See Layer 2 here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_(keyboard_layout)
P.S. Might be a bigger deal in German keyboard layout where these characters are very hard to reach 🤷♂️
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