CapsLock Again With Keyd

Well, another day, another distro, another fight with the uselessness that is the CapsLock key. My first two posts here and here work to varying degrees of success but either not well enough, or too damn complicated to set up. So here goes again - this should be short…

Ubuntu has a keyd package, but it didn’t work for me. Instead, I installed from source, made up a small config file, and started the daemon as instructed.

# /etc/keyd/default.conf
[ids]

*

[main]

capslock = overload(meta, esc)
leftshift = overload(shift, S-9)
rightshift = overload(shift, S-0)

delete = capslock
leftalt = leftcontrol
leftmeta = leftalt

It was that simple. This not only gives me CapsLock double-duty with Escape when tapped and Meta when held (for my i3/sway commands), but also gives me Space Cadet-esque parens on my shift keys, which I never thought I’d get on a laptop keyboard despite loving it on my Moonlander/ErgoDox.

Feels like it should be more complicated, but it’s really not.