At work I have a Windows PC. I don’t have much personal experience with Windows which is why I am asking.

I want to remap the caps lock key to function as a control key. Ideally, on a per-user basis as sometimes other people use the workstation and I don’t want to confuse them.

  • Was able to install Auto Hot Key. A test script worked. However I couldn’t find working instructions about how to do this specific remapping. Example scripts I found seem to have some conflict between v1 and v2 of AH.

  • I don’t have admin access however I could probably ask for something, but it would have to work immediately without a lot of fooling around. I will not be granted admin access to try a bunch of things til I find something that works.

What’s the best way?

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️
    1•8 months ago

    I don’t see how it would be a problem unless you reassigned it while caps lock was enabled, in which case you would have to reboot (or temporarily revert your remap) to turn it off.

    I can think of precious little software that actually requires caps lock for anything, and otherwise for normal typist tasks you can just use shift. I never use caps lock for anything, personally. (Ditto with num lock. My keyboard has a full number pad and a full set of arrow/insert keys. There is no reason for my number pad to ever not be a number pad.)

    • @[email protected]
      2•8 months ago

      I was asking because it is actually a problem for two reasons, one is that capslock has more states than other keys, plus it is more complicated to tinker with via AutoHotKey, they even documented it nicely buuut… the official method did not work for me — I just tested it.

      I did it in a hurry so there might be “me” problem somewhere too.

      Okay, it works.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      At home, once in a while caps lock turns itself on somehow. I have a shell alias to fix the problem:

      UNCAPS='xdotool key Caps_Lock'

      Should this happen at work I was thinking to either temporarily disable the application that is doing the remapping, or use some sort of onscreen keyboard to inactivate the caps lock.