I’ve recently switched to a very minimalist Arch Linux setup using BSPWM (from Windows) and it’s been quite the learning experience (I might write another blog post about this when I get the time to reflect on things). So far, I’be been enjoying it a lot!

For the past few months I’ve been using vim (even when I was on Windows, through WSL), however I never remapped my Caps Lock key to act as an Esc as so many people advised me to do. The other day I decided to give it a shot, here I’m just going to document how I did the remapping (for my own future reference).

I did the remapping using setxkbmap. For the available options with “caps”, I looked here:

grep "caps" /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.lst

Which gave me the following options:

[omitted for brevity]
...
caps:swapescape      Swap Esc and Caps Lock
caps:escape          Make Caps Lock an additional Esc
caps:escape_shifted_capslock Make Caps Lock an additional Esc, but Shift + Caps Lock is the regular Caps Lock
caps:backspace       Make Caps Lock an additional Backspace
caps:super           Make Caps Lock an additional Super
caps:hyper           Make Caps Lock an additional Hyper
caps:menu            Make Caps Lock an additional Menu key
caps:numlock         Make Caps Lock an additional Num Lock
caps:ctrl_modifier   Make Caps Lock an additional Ctrl
caps:none            Caps Lock is disabled
compose:caps         Caps Lock
compose:caps-altgr   3rd level of Caps Lock
shift:breaks_caps    Shift cancels Caps Lock
shift:both_capslock  Both Shift together enable Caps Lock
shift:both_capslock_cancel Both Shift together enable Caps Lock; one Shift key disables it
...
[omitted for brevity]

The first option I was interested in was caps:escape, because I would like my Caps Lock key to act as an additonal Esc rather than switch them around. The second option I was looking at was shift:both_capslock, because I’m one of those people that still uses Caps Lock and this option give me the ability to toggle it by pressing down on both shift keys, perfect!

I use startx with xinit instead of any login managers, so all I had to do was modify my .xinitrc to include the remapping just before I execute my window manager (BSPWM, in my case):

# Make Caps Lock an additional Esc and both Shift Keys toggle Caps Lock
setxkbmap -option caps:escape,shift:both_capslock &

# Start the window manager (BSPWM)
exec bspwm

Now, I can press both shift keys to toggle Caps Lock and Caps Lock acts as an additional Esc (much better for vim ergonomics).

You can check my dotfiles, if you’re interested in more details on my setup.