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Accepted
Hamish Downer
Asked: 2014-04-08 14:56:55 +0800 CST

How do I swap Escape and Caps Lock in 14.04?

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It appears that the keyboard Layout Options that allow things such as "Swap the Escape key and Caps Lock" have disappeared from the keyboard settings in 14.04 Is there another GUI where they can be set? Or is it back to dotfiles?

14.04

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Install the GNOME Tweak Tool (gnome-tweak-tool), under the Typing tab there is an option to swap Esc with Caps Lock. This worked for me in Ubuntu 14.04.

    gnome tweak tool typing section

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  2. I struggled with this a bit during my last OS setup, and found a solution. On this setup I had to trudge through the Internet again to find. Let me leave it here for future reference.

    I am using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (working with 16.04 too), and this is how I remapped my caps lock to escape:

    1. Open terminal
    2. Open the /etc/default/keyboard file with sudo (eg sudo nano /etc/default/keyboard)

    3. add caps:swapescape to the XKBOPTIONS. After modification the line should like the following

      XKBOPTIONS="caps:swapescape"

    Note that I did not try this with the caps:swapescape setting. I used the caps:escape setting; i.e. my modification just remaps caps lock to escape but does not map my escape to caps lock.

    My source

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  3. As I mention in another similar question, the usual way to swap Esc and Ctrl is with the following lines in the ~/.Xmodmap file:

    clear Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Escape
keysym Escape = Caps_Lock
add Lock = Caps_Lock

    This should work with all desktop environments (KDE, Gnome) on most common distros (Ubuntu and Debian family, Fedora and RH family).

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  4. Another solution is the one mentioned in this post how to permanently switch caps lock and esc that uses dpkg-reconfigure with a few extra steps but setting "caps:swapescape" in xkb-options

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