Remap Caps Lock and Left Control on Windows XP

Unfortunately I am stuck using Windows XP at work. Every other machine I use is Linux. To increase productivity I have always mapped the Caps Lock key to Control and vice versa. I almost never use the Caps Locks and very frequently use Control so it was an obvious change.

However, under Windows this is not very easy. It took lots of Google searching to find the solution. Save the following to caps-control.reg:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
“Scancode Map”=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,1D,00,3A,00,3A,00,1D,00,00,00,00,00,00

Simply right-click the file and tell Windows to merge the changes into the registry. The changes will take effect only after a reboot. Once I found the initial solution finding addition resources on the topic was easy.

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June 14, 2006 | Filed Under winxp 

Comments

7 Responses to “Remap Caps Lock and Left Control on Windows XP”

  1. Christopher Hesse on June 16th, 2006 12:42 am

    Besides using a keyboard with the control key in the correct position, this is probably the best idea. If you don’t have admin access on the machine (I have to use the computer lab computers sometimes), there is Autohotkey (http://www.autohotkey.com) you only need the line “CapsLock::Ctrl” in your Autohotkey.ini file.

  2. Cory on December 13th, 2006 1:58 am

    If you have Windows XP, why do you use linux? Basically I dont see any advantages to using linux over windows xp, Im dual booting windows and ubuntu. Ubuntu is nice and all but I dont see anything that would make me prefer it over windows.The only thing i have been using ubuntu for is web browsing playing music/movies (cant play games) which I can do better/hassle free in windows. So what are the advantages of l using linux over xp?

  3. David Stanek on December 13th, 2006 8:18 am

    In short I am a programmer and a control freak. It is nice to be able to quickly script my computer to do mundane tasks. Then there is also the philosophy and the community.

    For the average user Linux may not yet be attractive. Eventually though, Linux will have the same support and ease of use as Windows.

  4. Adam Henley on July 21st, 2007 10:39 am

    Cory: I just bought an old laptop off eBay, a pentium II with 64mb of ram. Could I run XP on it? Would I be that bat-shit insane to actually run XP on it? Hell no. It would run like an absolute dog. And why would I want to pay some exorbitant license fee to Microsoft for the privilege?

    The other problem I have is that I’ve only ever bought one machine from a retailer, and it came with windows 98. All the others have been built by me. Again, why would I choose to use the more expensive, more error-prone, more programmer-unfriendly operating system when I could just install GNU/Linux?

  5. Andy on November 5th, 2008 5:10 pm

    Adam, some people have jobs where they may have to work on Windows.

  6. mubed on February 12th, 2009 12:05 am

    There is also a way without rebooting, but needs an external tool: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Remap_CapsLock_or_other_keys_without_reboot_in_Windows

  7. Mapping Caps Lock to Control without Admin Access | /home/todd on May 19th, 2009 1:42 pm

    […] The good news: there’s a very simple registry hack to remap caps to control.  Seriously, it’s floating all over the internet.  Except, there’s a wrinkle–you need administrative access to edit the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry tree, which is what all of these hacks do.  For whatever reason, our school has decided computer science graduate students aren’t to be trusted with administrative access to their own computers [another rant for another time], so what’s a wrist-strained user to do? […]

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