
Swapping ESC and Caps Lock on Bodhi LinuxΒΆ
When former student Marco Sirabella told me last
year that back when Bill Joy first
created the vi text editor in 1976, the
ESC
key was located where the Caps Lock
key presently is, a light went
off in my head. I had long wondered why the otherwise motion efficient editor
had such a glaring flaw, making its users stretch their left pinky fingers
so far and so often. I became immediately obsessed with finding the best
ways to swap the ESC
and Caps Lock
keys on all my computers. For most
of the Linux distributions I use in my classroom
(including
Ubuntu,
Xubuntu,
Scientific Linux, and
Fedora, this
process is fairly trivial, since the GUI desktop configuration tools support
making the swap.
For my newest distro, Bodhi Linux, however, I searched in vain for any distro specific documentation on how to do this. I did find a solution, which I posted on the r/bodhlinux subreddit, asking if there was a more “Bodhi way” than the way I will describe below, but thus far no one has responded with one.
So, here is what I did:
Create the file
.speedswapper
in my home directory with the following contents:! Swap caps lock and escape remove Lock = Caps_Lock keysym Escape = Caps_Lock keysym Caps_Lock = Escape add Lock = Caps_Lock
Edit my
.bashrc
file to contain the following:# Run script to swap ESC and Caps Lock keys xmodmap ~/.speedswapper
That’s all there is to it. Either source the .bashrc
file or log out and
log back in, and the ESC and Caps Lock keys are swapped.