I would like to remap the Caps Lock key to some other unused key (in a system-wide fashion).

Being a MacVim.app user, I always liked to idea of remapping the Caps Lock key to some other key such as the "Help" key or the "End" key in order to use that piece of keyboard real estate to enter and exit insert mode.

Previously, in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, several options existed to do this, such as the excellent PCKeyboardHack which enabled the user to chose the key code that the caps lock key would send to the OS and operated at the driver level it seems. Or the other tool called DoubleCommand. None of these options work anymore under Mac OS X Lion (Gold Master). I tried to install them none the less and ended up with a kernel panic.

The "Keyboard" preference pane in the system preferences of both versions of Mac OS X has the possibility of remapping the caps lock key built-in as you can see in these pictures. But only to one of the other three modifier keys: namely "Control", "Command" and "Option". This is evidently not sufficient for creating a macro in vim. The Caps Lock key needs to be remapped to some other non-modifier key.

Other answers found in previous questions often contain a suggestion to use the Ukulele tool. This program has never had the ability to remap the Caps Lock key.

Other keyboard modifying software such as Consistent Keyboards has similar functionality but will not solve the problem.

Any help greatly appreciated !

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How about you want a few weeks to give the third party utility developers time to catch up? You chose to be an early adopter, so live with the downsides. – Daniel Beck Jul 13 '11 at 10:13
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Why the hostility towards xApple? I found his question pertinent, well formulated and in fact quite interesting. He also demonstrated he's done a lot of researching before asking. I don't want to believe this is how we are going to treat newcomers that conduct themselves exemplary as xApple did. – A Dwarf Jul 13 '11 at 10:51
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Yes, it is true, I decided to be an early adopter. And thus accept my suffering when pressing "i" and "Esc" continuously. But since chances are high this will be the retail version, I premptivlely posted this question and will wait a few weeks to give third parties time to catch up. – xApple Jul 13 '11 at 13:15
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This is a useful question to me. Lion is now released. – Scott Schulthess Jul 20 '11 at 16:19
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The Lion version of PCKeyboardHack is coming out soon, btw. – Vervious Jul 22 '11 at 5:11
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up vote 4 down vote accepted

PCKeyboardHack for Lion released and works great!

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PCKeyboardHack for Lion is done with development. Works Great!!!

PCKeyboardHack Support

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KeyRemap4MacBook is supposed to work with Lion.

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But you can't use it to remap ⇪ — the developer has released a separate application (PCKeyboardHack) for that. From the developer's website: PCKeyboardHack and NoEjectDelay require Mac OS X's source code which has been released by Apple. Now, the source code of Lion was released. We're developing "PCKeyboardHack and NoEjectDelay for Lion". We'll release these soon. Please wait. – Lri Jul 22 '11 at 14:18
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