caps2ctrl2esc

Make your keyboard a little less awful

What does it do?

CAPSLOCK is immediately remapped to L_CTRL
L_CTRL (and CAPSLOCK) will execute ESC when tapped

Dependencies

libevdev

Building

make

Execution

The following daemonized sample execution increases the application priority (since it'll be responsible for a vital input device, just to make sure it stays responsible):

sudo nice -n -20 ./caps2ctrl2esc >caps2ctrl2esc.log 2>caps2ctrl2esc.err &

Installation

Just execute this as previously mentioned somewhere in your bootup or .profile.

How it works

Executing caps2ctrl2esc without parameters (with the necessary privileges to access input devices) will make it monitor any devices connected (or that gets connected) that produces CAPSLOCK or ESC events.

Upon detection it will fork and exec itself now passing the path of the detected device as its first parameter. This child instance is then responsible for producing an uinput clone of such device and doing the programmatic keymapping of such device until it disconnects, at which time it ends its execution.

Caveats

As always, there's always a caveat:

It will "grab" the detected devices for itself.
If you tweak your key repeat settings, check whether they get reset.

History

This is a fork of the original caps2esc, which has since evolved into a full-on tool suite called interception-tools with plugins. caps2ctrl2esc is meant to serve as a simple, reliable replacement for utilities such as xcape.

License

GPL_v3

rslindee/caps2ctrl2esc