I use Vim a lot. And if you’re a productive user of Vim, you will definitely appreciate the following remaps:

  • ESC: I have remapped the Escape key to CAPSLOCK. Who uses CapsLock? ESC on the other hand is a Vim user’s go-to reflex. So keep it close-by.
  • ESC+HJKL: For navigation. Why would you use muscles to move over to the arrow keys when you have them under your fingers.

How-to

xmodmap can be used to modify these key settings. But I think it will only work for X-sessions.

I found dconf/org/gnome/desktop/input-sources/xkb-options to be a much more solid solution.

Under xkb-options you can put a “Custom value” like: ['caps:swapescape'] (note: syntax is important!!)

Windows Note

By far the best and most reliable key remapper on Windows is sharpkeys (randyrants/sharpkeys).