The story of how I find cool stuff, inevitably break said cool stuff, and (hopefully) end up fixing whatever I did

So I think we can all agree that whoever decided the caps lock key should get prime real estate should be stoned.  Seriously, it’s right where an extremely useful key could be placed…like escape!  Keys that can be toggled on and off, especially by software means, should not be given such huge buttons placed where other useful buttons should be in the first place.  I am a heavy Vim user, so I use escape A LOT to change modes.  If you’re an emacs *shuddersss* user you can remap this key to control but I am not going to tell you how as you should be using Vim anyway :p  I’m just kidding, it’s a simple word substitution I will show in a minute.  In order to get this setting to effect both console and X usages we will need to edit two different sets of files, both of which I will demonstrate.  This is a Linux/UNIX specific tutorial so apologize to you poor Windows and OS X users who are stuck out in the cold.  If it is demanded, I can show how to do this in OS X as it is a pain in the ass, but unfortunately I have no idea how to do this in Windows.  Sorry about your luck     Anyways…

In order to get this to work in the console for all users, stick this in your /etc/rc.local (this is an Arch Linux example, you just need this to be in a file that will be ran as root during startup):

This should make it so Caps Lock is remapped to escape at all times in the virtual consoles. If you wanted it to be remapped to control, just substitute “Control” for “Escape” there towards the end…simple enough.  Or you could just use Vim

In order for this to take effect in X, I use Xmodmap to remap the keycodes. The way I do it is to stick these two lines in the file ~/.Xmodmap:

Then in my .xinitrc have a line that says:

You can run that command in the console and, since it will be run at every boot, it will be a persistent setting. Having escape at a much more reachable position makes productivity soar…at least for me. It allows me to Vim and Vimperate at a much faster speed. Hope this helps! Post comments if you have any questions, I am happy to help.

To continue on my last post about mpd, I went on to figure out how to get my Macbook Pro’s media keys working with MPD and DWM. To catch those up who don’t know the acronyms, MPD is Music Player Daemon which is just a daemon that runs in the background that plays music and is controlled by clients (my personal favorite is ncmpcpp). DWM stands for Dynamic Window Manager, which is a super minimalist tiling window manager that is customized entirely by editing its source code and is also characterized by being super freaking awesome. This technique should work for any extra keys you may have on your keyboard and not necessarily just Macbooks.

What you’re going to need: xmodmap (to map keycodes to octal codes so dwm doesn’t bitch), xev (to get the correct keycodes for the keys you want to use), and mpc (just a simple cli client for mpd that takes simple parameters).

Here we go:

Use this snippet to start xev and get only the info that we need:

Once that has started, the press the keys you want to use for play, next, previous etc and write down the corresponding keycodes so you remember.

Use your favorite editor to open up .Xmodmap (name doesnt really matter, this is just what I use) and insert something to this effect:

Map whatever your keycodes might be to F and then some incremental number (F30,31,31, etc etc. I just used arbitrary numbers). You can ignore those first two line, I use them to remap my capslock key to escape (which is extremely useful if you’re a vim user…or you just realize how useless capslock is).

The run this to make the keymaps stick:

In order to make that change permanent you will need to add that line to your .xinitrc as well.

Now to editing the dwm code. These are the relavent lines from my config.h:

You will want to add the mpc and mpd lines exactly as they look there, carefully minding the ,’s and ;’s since this is C code. The 0′s where the modkey should be just mean that there is no modifier key required. Recomplie DWM, reload, test and voila! The keys you mapped should now control mpd as you wish!

Leave some comments if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to help.