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Comment by darkteflon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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