Through reading the great tmux book from pragprog.com I got the idea to repurpose the caps lock key as left control key. The idea seems brilliant, given how little used caps lock is. I don’t know for everyone, but most of my immediate friends and colleagues don’t use it at all – at least for the original purpose of switching to capital letters. Alas, the recipe was only given for Linux and Mac, because tmux doesn’t run on Windows directly. So I had to search and found this topic over at superuser.com which had almost what I wanted.
The solution I came up with is this:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout] "Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00
It means:
00 00 00 00 | Scancode map header 00 00 00 00 | Scancode map version 02 00 00 00 | DWORDs to follow 00 1D 00 3A | 3A (caps lock) to 1D (left ctrl) 00 00 00 00 | End marker
A tool I looked at in the course of my research was KeyTweak. Seems very useful indeed and can explain existing scancode maps. But I already had what I was looking for.
// Oliver