How can I remap my Caps-Lock key to Escape (for Vim) in Snow Leopard?

Question

Obviously, in Linux I can use xmodmap. On Leopard, I used an InputManager called PCKeyboardHack. But InputManagers are now broken.

How can I preserve my sanity and keep on using Caps Lock to Escape in OS X 10.6?

Answer 1

I may be way off as I'm nowhere near my Mac to check, but would Ukelele be able to remap the Caps lock? I know you can remap the Caps lock using system preferences too, but I think the possible replacements are limited (again away from a Mac to test)...

You could also see if doublecommand has that mapping included, as reports suggest it works in 32bit kernel mode in SL at least...

EDIT:

There seems to be a PCKeyboardHack fork for SL:

http://github.com/bjeanes/PCKeyboardHack

Answer 2

1. Open System Preferences
2. Open the Keyboard Preferences
3. Make sure you're on the 'Keyboard' tab
4. Click 'Modifier Keys'
5. Change them to whatever you like.

Answer 3

It's not really an answer to your question, but I imagine you want to remap the key so your finger hasn't so far to travel to switch Vim modes. A week or two ago I discovered that Ctrl-[ is the same as hitting Esc, and easier to type even though it's two keys.

I'd suggest teaching your fingers to do Ctrl-[ instead, then you don't need to remap any keys and you don't lose Caps-lock functionality.

Answer 4

had two issues when compiling.

1: Make sure you have the developer stuff in your path. specfically, add the following line to your path:

/Developer/usr/bin/

2: some bizarre error with otool not being found: the error I got looked like this "*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: 'launch path not accessible' "

use this to resolve it:

ln -s /Developer/usr/bin/otool /usr/bin/otool

after that, everything worked for me.