Is there a way to make Caps Lock switch keyboard layouts on Windows 8?

Question

I used to use Caps Lock to switch between keyboard layouts (e.g. between English and Russian), as opposed to Windows built-in inconvenient CtrlShift and AltShift combos.

On earlier versions of Windows that could be achieved by a Recaps utility. However, for some reason, it does not work on Windows 8 properly. More specifically, while it works fine in old-style applications, Caps Lock does nothing in Metro applications: the layout is not switched, and "CapsLock" mode is not entered as well.

Is there any way to switch keyboard layouts with the Caps Lock key in all applications on Windows 8, including Metro ones?

Answer 1

This answer helped me a lot: sing CapsLock to switch the keyboard language layout.

Recaps worked fine until I upgraded to Windows 10 and Skype 7.1. After that Skype was hanging after I was pressing CapsLock. This solution with AutoHotkey helped a lot and now i still have keyboard layout switching on CapLock and Skype is not hanging. Hope this will help someone.

Answer 2

One option would be to

1. Configure Windows to use grave accent to switch keyboard layouts;
2. Remap Caps Lock to grave accent, and grave accent to the special key 0x0056 (by manually editing Windows registry, or using tools such as SharpKeys);
3. Use MS Keyboard Layout Creator (only supported on x86/x64, not ARM) to create the custom keyboard layout which will interpret 0x0056 in the same way standart layout interprets grave accent / tilde.

This solution will work in all apps, and will not depend on some resident process intercepting key presses (such as Recaps).