Easiest way

Almost a decade ago the Happy Hacking keyboard came out.  This was a brilliant product that I can’t believe hasn’t altogether replaced the PC layout and monster keyboard footprint.  I’ve had a few through the years, and I highly recommend them.  They have been at the $70 mark all along though, so I’ve decided to stop buying them, when commodity keyboards are a dime a dozen, even the small footprinted ones.  I’ve also had the legendary OMNIKEY (and maintain it as a keepsake), which is hands down the best keyboard ever made (clickety-click-clack).  But they’re even pre-PS/2, so probably impossible to get working with USB (let me know if you’ve done it!).  So that’s the first and simplest solution if you’ve got the budget: spend the money to get a great UNIX keyboard.

Harder, cheaper way (still easy enough)

But you probably work at various machines, and everyone has a budget.  And sometimes we have to use that silly laptop keyboard.  So now you’re looking at a keyboard reconfig.  If you just want to make CapsLock go away (not a bad idea) and put Ctrl where it’s supposed to be (left of ‘A‘), you can use GNOME to swap them.  Something like: System -> Preferences -> Keyboard -> Layouts -> Other Options -> Ctrl Key Position -> Make CapsLock an additional Ctrl.  There’s also some swapping options, but overall the options there are pretty rigid and don’t get you all the way there.  So don’t bother with this approach, unless you only want to fix the Ctrl key.

What you really need is xkeycaps.  You can install it in a Debian-based system with apt-get install xkeycaps.  Other distros should also make it easy.  It’s not the most intuitive tool to use if you haven’t played with it before (that’s why I’m writing this), so I’ll walk you through what I did with it.  BTW, it’s an ancient tool, from the legendary hacker Jamie Zawinski.

Some keyboard layouts vary slightly from the 104-key standard, but I believe you can get any cheapo or absurd laptop layout to do the right thing with a little experimentation.  We’re going to be reassigning some keys.  It’s crucial that Esc is in a friendly spot — that probably means just left of your 1 key.  Even on a small keyboard with an Esc just one close row up, it’s still too far; you’ve gotta try putting it in the optimal spot.  But then you’ll be losing `~ (or something)!  What a dilemma!  You can’t code without those.  Some will disagree with me here, but I have found the RightAlt key to be a great, easily right-thumb-accessible, unused key, so that’s what I now use for `~.  RightAlt is a sad loss if you’ve got a crappy mouse (since RightAlt-LeftArrow have been the canonical browser back-button), but that may be the subject of another article.  Just get a 5-button or tilt-wheel mouse; recent Ubuntus do the right thing with the extra buttons, in my experience.  So we’ll proceed here to use RightAlt as the `~ replacement.  And we’ll be throwing away the original inaccessible Esc.  That top Function key row is off limits for touch-typists.

You can scramble a bunch of keys around as your see fit for your MO.  Here’s the process I used (as close as I can recall) for the Ctrl, Esc, `~ reassignments I’ve been describing:

• Fire it up from a terminal: xkeycaps
• Just say ‘ok’ on the first screen which should default to the right ‘PC’ layout.
• Hover over the Esc key and notice the KeySym at the top, indicating you’ve looking at Esc.  If you screw anything up, this is the place to see it.
• Move away and physically press Esc and watch it light up on the screen.  Now you can verify any key’s position, which you want to do for any changing keys.
• Make sure all the keys we care about are mapping to the right location.  I found that RightAlt on my wacky keyboard was actually mapping to my number pad’s Enter.  So figure out what your RightAlt is by pressing it.  That’s what we’ll reassign.
• Make the first reassignment.  Right-click-hold on `~ and select Duplicate key.  Then click on RightAlt (or its equivalent).  Now you’ve got another `~ key! (and you can probably figure out the rest).
• Now we can reassign the original `~ to be an Esc.
• Do the same Duplicate key trick to make the original Esc duplicated over `~.
• Finally, do that process one more time assigning the original Ctrl (crazy bottom-left postion) over the top of CapsLock.  Added bonus: no more CapsLock key (remedy that if you want).
• Write out the new layout with the Write Output button (just the Changed Keys is enough).
• Now you’ve got a new ~/.xmodmap-machinename file.  I believe it’s already been activated at this point, or at least xkeycaps has done some magic.
• You’re done.  You might find that some things are not working at this point.  You can always restart xkeycaps and restore to defaults.  But you’ve likely got things right, and just need to log out of X and log back in.  My arrow keys broke when I did this before restarting X.
• Every time you start up X you’ll need to run xmodmap ~/.xmodmap-machinename.  But Ubuntu (or something) actually automatically detected my new .xmodmap and prompted me to ask if I wanted to use it.  That was friendly!
• Use some white-out or tape to relabel your new keys. (optional)

Whew!  That was quite a few steps.  Fortunately, it’s just a one time setup, and subsequent uses of xmodmap at login are trivial (put it  in your .bash_profile or equivalent if not prompted; use $(uname -n) to make it flexible for a shared profile).  I hope you’ve got it working now.  You can leave a comment if you’re having any trouble with the steps and maybe I (or someone) will be able to figure it out.  Breathe a sigh of relief as you re-train your fingers to stop stretching.

I can no longer type without the hack described here.  You can probably alter it for any machine you’re on and any of your own different preferences.  I’m also considering making Ctrl-J a permanent duplicate for Enter.

I should also add a rant for why this article and tools need to exist: Shame on IBM and Microsoft and all the others involved for being such layout idiots and costing the world so much in ongoing CTS healthcare costs.  Especially when the optimal layout was already well-known and widely used.  Remind you of anything (backslash path separator, another ergonomic impropriety; plus countless others)?  It’s really interesting to just stare down at the PC location of Ctrl and Esc, two essential keys probably both in the top 5. They couldn’t possible have been put in less convenient places. Well, maybe they were just taking the QWERTY model of slowing down typists to the next level.  I’m surprised they didn’t think to move Shift up to F5 and Enter over to ScrollLock.

Be sure to thank Jamie for saving your wrist and adding years of screen time to your life.

* Furthermore, I make the typical assumption you’re using some *NIX variant.  Why else would you be here?  But if you’re using Windows or a Mac there are some other tools floating around that will help you customize your keyboard layout; I’m sure they’ll be different from xkeycaps.  Whether hacker or not, anyone can benefit by making these changes.