Mapping CAPS to ESC

WHO NEEDS CAPS?

I am using vim in my daily editing. As a vim user it is a pain to switch back from insert or visual mode, because this is done with the escape key. Sure, it’s not a big deal, just move your left hand a bit up and reach to the sad lonely button far to the top left of your keyboard. You could almost feel bad for that poor little fellow to be so alone…

But when your fingers are otherwise glued to the home row of your keyboard, this constant pressing of the escape key really becomes annoying. It just breaks your flow a bit. On the other hand there is the caps lock key which directly next to your left pinky, usually exra big and juicy to press. Just that noone ever presses it!

Long story short: just switch both keys or make the caps lock key another escape key. The documentation and block posts about this can sometimes be confusing, mostly because currently a lot of info is filling the internet which is now considered deprecated. The simplest solution I know is to add the following line to your shell’s rc file, ~/.zshrc in my case.

setxkbmap -option caps:escape

The command is pretty self explanatory. A bit more verbose it reads

Set the X keyboard mapping option for the caps lock key to the escape key

This only takes effect when your shell is started for the first time, but since I use vim in console mode (not gvim), this works just fine for me.