Setting Caps Lock to Ctrl for all keyboards

October 18, 2022 1-minute read

you don’t really care about VMs and
just need this to work on the host for ALL keyboards, including those that you plug in after boot, and
you’re using X11,

X11 uses XKB (X Keyboard Extension) to control the keyboard layout.

You can set the default with this

$ sudo localectl set-x11-keymap us pc105 '' 'ctrl:nocaps'

And then reboot

$ sudo reboot

localectl will automatically create/update the right configuration file (/etc/default/keyboard if you’re using Debian/Ubuntu or /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf) for you.