Rebinding the capslock key

Author's note: This walkthrough was originally written 11/13/2015, but vaious keyboard shortcuts have been updated since then.

Updated 9/4/2016: Including the Linux process for this.

Inspired by this reddit thread.

Why rebind my capslock key?

• it's (virtually) useless and takes up a ton of real estate on your keyboard.
• you can increase your productivity by creating more keyboard shortcuts
• you hit it accidentally far too often
• all the cool people are doing it

To give you an idea of how you would use this setup, here's the shortcuts I'm currently using.

My Shortcuts

The general idea is to not stray from the home row as much as possible. Less movement = more effiency!

• caps + t : open a terminal
• caps + r : =>
• caps + f : ->
• caps + F : <-
• caps + qe : home and end
• caps + space : escape key
• caps + wasd : arrow keys
• caps + hjkl : also arrow keys
• caps + delete : delete, not backspace
• caps + enter : to actually turn on capslock

Boring Disclaimer

All directions given for navigating through Seil and Karabiner are current as of the time of writing. Use these instructions at your own risk, I am not responsible for you remapping ' to ` . This tutorial works for OSX and my specific linux setup, but the same principal can be applied to other OSs.

Process

OSX

1. Install Karabiner

2. Intall Seil

3. Open Seil and remap capslock

   • expand the "change the capslock" key dropdown

   • follow the instructions under 'Important:'

   • change the keycode to 110. This is the keycode for the PC application button, so it is something one would never use in osx

4. add a custom private.xml file for Karabiner

   • in Karabiner under the 'Misc & Uninstall' tab there is a button to open private.xml, this will open a finder in the location

   • Feel free to copy my private.xml file here

   • quit and reload Karabiner for the changes to take place

   • If you copied my file you should see a setting on the top that says 'My capslock key settings'. Make sure this is checked

   • If you modify private.xml, remember you must click the reload xml button in Karabiner for the changes to take place

   • Check out the Karabiner documentation

   • This is a very helpful reference for keycodes

And you can now use your capslock key for useful things!

Briefly, what I am doing is defining a new modifier key (like command, option, or shift) and binding capslock to that key so that we can create our own shortcuts with capslock + some key.

Linux

I did this process on my acer chromebook, which has a search key instead of a capslock key, so instructions might vary according to your device.

1. Figure out the keycode of the search (or capslock) key

   We can use xev to do this.

   xev will show us a bunch of information about all the events happening while it is running. What's important to us is that is shows the keycodes of the keys that are pressed. Press your capslock key and make note of the keycode.

2. Rebind search key (or capslock) to super so that we can use it as a modifier key

   You could also use hyper or meta if you already make use of a super key.

   Replace 133 with the keycode of your key if it's different.

   xmodmap -e 'keycode 133 = Super_R'
   

3. Install autokey

   Autokey bills itself as a 'desktop automation utility'. We can use it to bind custom key combinations to our newly bound super key.

   sudo apt-get install autokey-gtk
   

   Note: if anything goes wrong with autokey, the log file is located by default in ~/.config/autokey/autokey.log

4. Write autokey snippets

   While autokey gives you the power to write full python scripts, all we really need is to send a key or phrase when we hit a key combination. We can write what autokey calls 'phrases' to accomplish this, and bind our specific key combination to trigger them.

   For example, write a phrase like the following:

   <up>
   

   and bind it to super + w, or whatever key combination you want to trigger the up key.

   A full list of special keys that autokey supports can be found here.

5. (Maybe) Rebind window manager keys

   This process might cause some conflicts with whatever default keybindings are setup with your window manager, so you might need to change those.