Remap Caps Lock to Escape and Control

Goal: use the caps2esc utility to make the Caps Lock key act like the Escape key when pressed alone and act like the Control key when pressed in combination with other keys.

Motivation: pleasant, ergonomic, system-wide access to the very useful escape and control keys and a better Vim or Emacs experience.

References:

• The caps2esc GitLab page
• Ask Ubuntu: How do I install caps2esc?

The caps2esc utility allows you to remap Caps Lock to Escape and Control at the level of the libevdev library. Bonus: because libevdev is relatively low level—just above the operating system kernel—this solution works in a plain Linux console in addition to graphical environments.

Procedure

Here’s what to do:

Installation

Install the caps2esc package from the Arch community repo:

# Install caps2esc
sudo pacman -S interception-caps2esc

This should also install the interception-tools package as a dependency. The interception-tools package contains an input device monitoring program called udevmon, which we will use shortly to capture Caps Lock and Escape key presses.

Configure udevmon

Create the configuration file /etc/udevmon.yaml (if necessary) and inside it add the following job:

- JOB: "intercept -g $DEVNODE | caps2esc | uinput -d $DEVNODE"
  DEVICE:
    EVENTS:
      EV_KEY: [KEY_CAPSLOCK, KEY_ESC]

Tip: the above udevmon configuration will make Caps Lock work as Escape and Control, and also make Escape work as Caps Lock. If you want the Escape key to still behave as Escape, you can replace caps2esc with caps2esc -m 1, which uses the caps2esc “minimal mode” and leaves the Escape key unaffected (see caps2esc -h for documentation).

You now just need to start the udevmon program, which we will do using a systemd unit.

A systemd unit for udevmon

Create the systemd unit file /etc/systemd/system/udevmon.service (if necessary) and inside it add the contents

[Unit]
Description=udevmon
Wants=systemd-udev-settle.service
After=systemd-udev-settle.service

# Use `nice` to start the `udevmon` program with very high priority,
# using `/etc/udevmon.yaml` as the configuration file
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/nice -n -20 /usr/bin/udevmon -c /etc/udevmon.yaml

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

This service unit starts the udevmon program with very high priority (nice lets you set a program’s scheduling priority; -20 niceness is the highest possible priority). Make sure the path to uvdevmon in the ExecStart line (e.g. /usr/bin/udevmon) matches the output of which udevmon.

Then enable and start the udevmon service:

# Enable and start the `udevmon` service
sudo systemctl enable --now udevmon.service

# Optionally verify the `udevmon` service is active and running
systemctl status udevmon

At this point you should be done—try using e.g. <CapsLock>-L to clear the terminal screen (like you would normally do with <Ctrl>-L). If the udevmon service is enabled, the udevmon program should automatically start at boot in the future.