I WAS paying attention and I was fully aware how nice your hack works. I just wanted to give some trivia of how my particular keyboard layout works.

Philip

about Caps Lock being usless: With the swiss german keyboard layout, capslock doesn’t at all work like it would if you pressed and hold shift:

Caps Lock only affects normal letters that actually have a uppercased form.

So if Caps Lock is enabled and you press the a-Key, it’ll convert it to A. But if you press the 5-key, it’ll do nothing. This is different from any other keyboard layout I know where it would be converted to Shift-5 (% here).

This is interesting, because we have some accented characters available on shifted keys.

Let’s take the ö-Key:

unshifted, no caps lock: ö
shifted, no caps lock: é
unshifted, caps lock: Ö
shifted, caps lock: É

Pressing shift when caps lock is enabled will revert the uppercasing again.

So caps lock is – with the swiss layout – actually doing what its name implies: It locks your keyboard so it only creates capitalized letters.

Actually, to write Ö, we only have two options:

1) Caps lock on and the ö-key
2) Hit the dead-key ¨ and then Shift-O

I prefer the Caps lock way as it means one fewer key press.

Granted. Not that many nouns (remember, in german you capitalize nouns) begin with a ö, so it doesn’t happen all that often, but still, I prefer Caps Lock to be where it is.

Still, you provide us with a nice trick. I just wanted to add some trivia

Philip

xmodmap -pke > ~/.xmodmaprc

Edit the .xmodmaprc file to taste. (It automatically uses it when you start up.)

Look at the pretty light.

Miles- I’m not removing it, but moving it. The caps lock still exists on my system.

Can Bican- Good idea! Placing the caps lock as a meta key under/above the scroll lock is a perfect idea.

Garren- If you have put the switch in your ~/.xmodmap file, it will take effect at startup. Setting the repeat is the only thing that you need to do manually. However, you can have a script launch that at startup as well.

Brian- The code for the escape key is 0×09. Now that I think about it, putting the escape key is where the Windows key is is a great idea, just because of vim.