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Comment by rzwitserloot | Hacker News Reader

This article begins by explaining that karabiner (software for macs) lets you remap caps lock to escape.

Which is true.

But very misleading: That is a feature the OS itself supports, out of the box: System Preferences, Keyboard, Modifier Keys... – and voila, here you can pick 'escape' in the dropdown next to 'caps lock key'.

And speaking of that option, go do that right now. Even if you don't have a touchbar :)

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What MacOS can’t do natively, though - at least, last I checked - is allow caps lock to function as escape when tapped but ctrl when held. Karabiner does this and it’s seriously convenient.

If I can entice non-Karabiner users further, if you do this mod you can also configure Caps Lock to be enabled when you press both Shift keys at the same time. It's a super fun combo to hit.

Is there a way to achieve this on Windows? This sounds very convenient.

I used Randy Rants SharpKeys to remap CapsLock to Esc, but I don't think the double mapping is supported.

I have used TouchKeys on Windows, which doesn't do exactly what you ask for, but is also pretty nice: it makes Space into a modifier key, and you can configure the combinations. E.g. Space+J could be cursor down, or Space+G could be escape. Tapping Space itself just produces a space. But it does mean that you lose the key repeat functionality of the space bar. So I used Space+S to produce space, and that works well with key repeat.

I use AHK to do this for Windows. It's a lifesaver, but it is not as reliable and it is very finicky -- the capslock to ctrl/escape usually works but sometimes it doesn't. AHK sometimes run into problem with Remote Desktop and Synergy.

Yes, I was really hoping to get something other that AHK. SharpKeys is much more stable to the point of where it pretty much "just works". It doesn't need a daemon running in the background.

Autohotkey supports this on Windows

autohotkey.

Do the same for enter, so that Ctrl-L is not too painful

That's not completely true. Karabiner does something MacOS cannot do, which is a momentary switch functionality. For example, I use it so that tapping capslock will activate ESC but holding it down with another key will activate CTRL instead. It's such as cool feature that I can no longer use a keyboard without this functionality.

I can also do this using Hammerspoon, although I prefer doing it via keyboard that supports it (ie QMK firmware-based keyboard) so that I can use it on Windows / Linux as well.

Misleading is a tad bit extreme :).

FWIW: I did mention it in a first draft but removed it cause it seemed like fluff.

> You can do this pretty easily with Karabiner but it barely scratches the surface of Karabiner’s true power.

Karabiner is far far more powerful than just basic key mappings.

Also the linked blog post at the bottom mentions the exact point you make (viz if all you need is a caps lock to escape mapping, use the built in features on the Mac)

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