Recycling Caps Lock into something useful - Ubuntu (12.04)

Caps Lock is a useless key for most people. Sure, it has it’s uses in Enterprise and for times when someone on the internet is wrong, but generally it’s just a key that takes up prime real estate on your keyboard with no particularly useful function.

Google phased it out completely with the launch of their ChromeOS laptops and replaced it with a search key. This was a great idea! From day one of having a keyboard without Caps Lock I was hooked. Tapping a Search/Super/Windows key where the Caps Lock key usually is feels much more fluid – far less awkward than the key on the bottom left of a conventional keyboard.

If – like me – you dislike Caps Lock, there are ways of ridding it from your keyboard all together…

Canonical have made it really easy to recycle it into something far more useful. It’s literally four steps.

1) Open Keyboard Layout

2) Click Options

3) Select Caps Lock key behaviour

4) Select your function. I chose to make mine an additional super, as I do with all machines.

That’s all there is to it. The change will take immediate effect after clicking close.

Simples.