Lee Byron

tilremap caps lock

The caps lock key is conveniently located next to your left pinkie on the home row, easier to press than almost all other modifiers despite being one I find least useful. Luckily, macOS makes it very easy to remap this key1.

In System Preferences → Keyboard, press “Modifier Keys…” to open a menu mapping physical keys to the action they apply. I always remap my caps lock key to “Control”, since I spend a fair amount of time in Terminal, where Control is used a fair amount (like Control-C to send SIGINT, or Control-Z to send SIGTSTP).

Screen Shot 2022-01-15 at 8.39.01 PM.png

  1. There is other software for much more powerful key remapping, which I’ll write about in the future. It’s nice that this is an OS-provided preference, so you can quickly set it without installing anything.