Tales From The Geek Side

I’m an emacs user, there I said it.

As an emacs user I use the ctrl key a lot. I don’t know the history of it all but at some point someone decided it would be a good idea to put Caps Lock next to the ‘a’ key and move the ctrl key way down to the bottom of the board forcing emacs users to scrunch their pinky fingers like a contortionist. I don’t like the person that made this decision.

I usually just use xmodmap to make Caps Lock become a second ctrl key. However I’ve become increasingly annoyed when I’m on a console. I finally took the time to learn how to change the keymap in the console. I used the information in the previous link (at the bottom of the page) to make Caps Lock go away because Caps Lock is useful only to those who wish to annoy people to death via email, forums, or usenet.

On my Debian systems I edit ‘/usr/share/keymaps/i386/qwerty/us.kmap.gz’. I change ‘keycode 58 = Caps_Lock’ to be ‘keycode 58 = Control’. And then life is good again.

keycode  58 = Ca