So who here accidentally hits the Caps Lock key on their keyboard and ALL YOUR TYPING LOOKS LIKE YOU ARE IMPERSONATING THE LATE BILLY MAYS? Right, I thought so. And who here would like to be able to type those Unicode characters we don’t have on a QWERTY keyboard besides typing a odd chain of the control+shift+U and 4 characters requiring knowlege of every Unicode character or having a chart open at all times. Go ahead, try this: CTRL+SHIFT+U 00f4 and you should get ô. Very painful no doubt. Well all you Linux users out there (and possibly other OS users) I have come across a solution that not only prevents you from LOOKING LIKE YOU ARE YELLING WHILE YOU TYPE, but also allows you to simply type in characters such as ®, ©, £, ‽, while requiring no painful combination of keys to hold down at once.
What this modification does is replace the binding of your Caps Lock Key and turn it into the Compose Key using xmodmap, a utility for modifying keymaps and pointer but mappings in X. The Compose key is a key that allowed you to press it and then two other keys to produce another character in the Unicode Character Set. For instance you could press <Compose> followed by “-L” (dont type the quotes) , and then get £. The combinations are fairly simple and most of the time you can guess, or reference this page.
The Mod – Linux Only
This is extremely painless and doesnt even require being root, all you need to do is open your favourite terminal emulator and type the following commands:
$ xmodmap -e "remove Lock = Caps_Lock"
$ xmodmap -e "keysym Caps_Lock = Multi_key"
$ xmodmap -e "add Lock = Caps_Lock"
Quite simply we remove the Caps_Lock function from the Caps Lock Key on the keyboard map, then have the Caps_Lock keysym produce the Multi_key keysym, and then reassign Caps_Lock back to Caps Lock on the map except with the Multi_key function replacing Caps_Lock thus giving us a Compose Key.
For those not on Linux
As for those of you on Mac OS or Windows, we can’t exactly do this but there are other options.
For Mac users your Option key serves a purpose similar to the Compose Key except you have a more limited range of characters you may create. A reference for that may be found here.
And as for you sinners Windows users, you may either be stuck with holding in ALT+4 digits to produce corresponding Unicode characters, or you may utilize the open source application known as AllChars.
For those who produce keyboards
Please get rid of the Caps Lock key, it is for an era long gone where all commands were required to be in Uppercase. All it does now is serve a nuisance and give people a way to shout on the internet easier. I suggest that the Compose Key be brought back to the standard keyboard layout. Why? It makes more sense, is more useful than Caps Lock, and would also extend the range of characters a user could input as a password increasing security.
