How do I swap Escape and Caps Lock in 14.04?

Install the GNOME Tweak Tool (gnome-tweak-tool), under the Typing tab there is an option to swap Esc with Caps Lock. This worked for me in Ubuntu 14.04.

gnome tweak tool typing section


As I mention in another similar question, the usual way to swap Esc and Ctrl is with the following lines in the ~/.Xmodmap file:

clear Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Escape
keysym Escape = Caps_Lock
add Lock = Caps_Lock

This should work with all desktop environments (KDE, Gnome) on most common distros (Ubuntu and Debian family, Fedora and RH family).


I struggled with this a bit during my last OS setup, and found a solution. On this setup I had to trudge through the Internet again to find. Let me leave it here for future reference.

I am using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (working with 16.04 too), and this is how I remapped my caps lock to escape:

  1. Open terminal
  2. Open the /etc/default/keyboard file with sudo (eg sudo nano /etc/default/keyboard)
  3. add caps:swapescape to the XKBOPTIONS. After modification the line should like the following

    XKBOPTIONS="caps:swapescape"

Note that I did not try this with the caps:swapescape setting. I used the caps:escape setting; i.e. my modification just remaps caps lock to escape but does not map my escape to caps lock.

My source