Rationale

I find the CAPS LOCK key to be vital keyboard real estate wasted on a worthless (and often harmful) key.

Version Notes

There are two versions. I just found out how to swap keystrokes under UNIX using kbdcontrol, which allows for remapping on both tty-terminals and X11, as compared to the usual xmodmap, which although more well known, only works in X, hence the name.

The shell scripts and registry patches are public domain, even though it says they are "BSD licensed" in the copyright file... I will update the tarballs later. Use at your own risk, no warranty is given. Uninstaller not currently available for Windows version. (If you need help fixing this urgently, I can help you)

Download

If you would like to download this patch, select the file corresponding to the operating system that most closely matches the one you have installed.

Windows NT/2k/XP (Not 9x)

Tested on Windows 2000, XP
ZIP Archive, currently no uninstaller

*BSD, tty console

(should work on any *BSD, will not work on Linux)
Tested on FreeBSD, NetBSD
TAR.BZ2 Archive

GNU/Linux, tty console

(should probably work for all distributions, but I have only used it on Slackware about 8-9 years ago) Not yet, will be ready soon enough.

All *nix, X11

Add the following to your .Xmodmap

!
! Swap Esc and Caps_Lock
! By Timothy Beyer
!

remove Lock = Caps_Lock
keysym Escape = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Escape
add Lock = Caps_Lock

Patch Created / Updated on 2002-??-??, 2003-07-25, 2004-06-05 by Timothy Beyer.