Comments on: How to swap Caps-lock and Esc keys in Ubuntu

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:04:47 +0000

I’ve found that the Gnome built-in keyboard layout ability isn’t that smooth. For example if I set up Dvorak, I still have to press CTRL-D (the key labeled D) to get a CTRL-D. I can’t press CTRL-[key remapped to D]. But other things randomly seem to be remapped even with CTRL. It’s quite odd.

By: Nathaniel

Nathaniel — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 03:49:56 +0000

Simon, thanks for the tip. I have found that the solution Baron posted works sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t work, and I don’t know why. I didn’t know you could customize the keyboard so much in Gnome. Cool!

Thanks Baron for posting the solution, it has helped for about a year!

By: Arnaud

Arnaud — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 07:51:11 +0000

For those who come here looking for an OS X solution you might want to look at http://www.pqrs.org/tekezo/macosx/keyremap4macbook/extra.html

By: Simon Law

Simon Law — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:35:19 +0000

A better way to do this is to go into System > Preferences > Keyboard. Then go to “Layouts”, click on “Layout Options…” and expand the “CapsLock key behaviour” group. There, you’ll see “Swap ESC and CapsLock”.

But what I find really nice is to make CapsLock a Control key. Then I just type Control-[ which is also ESC.