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I used to have the caps lock and control swapped in GNOME, but when I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 I also changed my desktop environment to Xfce. I have the following line in my xorg.conf:

Option          "XkbOptions"    "ctrl:nocaps"

But that doesn't seem to make a difference to Xfce. Any ideas?

Marcel Levy
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6 Answers6

39

I ended up removing the "XkbOptions" line from my xorg.conf, and adding this to Xfce's autostart:

/usr/bin/setxkbmap -option "ctrl:nocaps"

It turns the caps lock key into an additional Ctrl, which does the trick for me. If you wanted a straight swap, I believe "ctrl:swapcaps" would work. For what it's worth, this page is a fairly decent guide:

http://manicai.net/comp/swap-caps-ctrl.html

I haven't had a change to try the other methods yet, but I also have a netbook with a slightly funky layout, and I might need to muck around with it a bit.

Marcel Levy
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13

I use XFCE but this solution should work for any desktop environment on Debian or Ubuntu:

Replace the XKBOPTIONS definition in /etc/default/keyboard with

XKBOPTIONS="ctrl:swapcaps"

This affects all users on the system. Replace with ctrl:nocaps if you want no keys to act as caps lock.

This won't affect your current session (you have to restart X11),
so you can run this command line to change things until then:

$ setxkbmap -option ctrl:swapcaps

To affect only your user, have the above command run as a part of your session: Open your XFCE Settings (run xfce4-settings-manager) and click on Session and Startup, go to the Application Autostart tab, and Add that command.

holocronweaver
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Adam Katz
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2

Use xkeycaps to look at your keyboard mapping and swap the META and ALT modifiers, or just swap the entire keys. If you plan on using any GNOME apps, GNOME has some assumptions about which keys have META and ALT modifiers. It'll probably make your life easier to swap the keys entirely.

Brent
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shapr
  • 437
2

You could try xmodmap

I have a small netbook computer with an annoying extra key next to the left-shift key. By putting the following in ~/.Xmodmap, I can re-map the key to be another left-shift key.

keycode 94 = Shift_L
add shift = Shift_L

Perhaps you can do something similar to swap you caps-lock and control keys?

Brent
  • 24,065
2

The problem with all of the other answers is that if you use a USB keyboard and any USB event happens then you will lose your settings. After many years, many failed attempts and visiting this page many times I finally have a solution that survives USB events:

  1. Install inputplug

For arch this I needed to use community repos: yay -S inputplug

  1. Create a script that sets up your custom keyboard settings

Here's the script (~/on-new-kbd) I use to maps caps to control and also to set the compose key to be right control (useful for typing things like '€')

#! /bin/sh

echo >&2 "$@"
event=$1 id=$2 type=$3


case "$event $type" in
'XIDeviceEnabled XISlaveKeyboard'
        /usr/bin/setxkbmap -option 'ctrl:nocaps'
        /usr/bin/setxkbmap -option 'compose:rctrl'
esac
  1. Make sure it runs at startup

Make it run when xfce starts by adding a new autostart entry. Do this by creating the file .config/autostart/inputplug.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=0.9.4
Type=Application
Name=inputplug
Comment=Detect new keyboards and apply settings like caps - > ctrl
Exec=/usr/bin/inputplug --bootstrap --command ~/on-new-kbd
OnlyShowIn=XFCE;
RunHook=0
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false
Hidden=false
Mike McKay
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  • 2
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2

Xfce should be the same as GNOME and all other desktop environments here - what probably happened is it broke in the upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 for all environments, since Xorg keyboard & mouse configuration options moved from xorg.conf to HAL.

More info on the new configuration methods can be found in pages such as:

alanc
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