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 It's a shame such a great spot on the keyboard has such a useless default key mapping. I've found it useful to map capslock to backspace but I have run into similar typing-before-the-rebind-script-runs issues.