Have you ever hit that Caps Lock key by accident and wished you could disable it? Does your keyboard have those fancy multimedia keys, but you aren't able to use them? We'll try to fix that using a few cool open source tools.

First we'll look at a tool called xmodmap. xmodmap is a program used to edit the keyboard modifier map and keymap tables. Applications use these to convert keycodes from the keyboard into keysyms like "Up", "Down", "Delete", etc. You can either run xmodmap directly with some expression that you'd like it to evaluate for this session, or you can edit your personal xmodmap config file (usually ~/.xmodmaprc).

We'll use the following command to disable that pesky Caps Lock key.

xmodmap -e "clear lock"

Now, the Caps Lock shouldn't bother you anymore. Again, you need to put this into your config file to have this setting everytime you login.

If you want to see what your modifier map looks like now, run the command

xmodmap -pke | less

this should give you a list of your current modifier map.

A nice gui to manipulate the modifier map without have to remember the syntax for xmodmap is a program called xkeycaps. It allows you to graphically disable keys, switch keys, etc. It's very nice.