Changing Caps Lock behaviour in Mint 17.3?

dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd · February 21, 2016

Being in Belgium, I use the Belgian keyboard layout, which is based on the French one.

My problem involves the numerical keys above the regular letters. Unlike qwerty users, we need to use the shift button to get the numbers.

Normal : &é"'(§è!çà

Shift : 1234567890

Caps lock should behave like shift, but it doesn't. I get &É"'(§È!çÀ , which is basically the same as the normal ones but the é, è and à have been capitalized.

I've tried every variant of the Belgian layout and every setting of the caps lock behavior, and keep getting the same incorrect behavior.

Does anyone know a way to make caps lock act like a proper shift lock?

Using the numerical pad on the right is not an option on my laptop, and I have to use said laptop to do a lot of spreadsheet stuff for work. Switching layouts is too much of an inconvenience, I'd have to do that 50 or more times in a single day then.

Zvon · February 21, 2016

1) That is the correct behavior of CapsLock

2) If you want to turn one of your keys into a Shift Lock here are a few options - http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/224827/how-do-i-enable-shift-lock-sticky-shift-key (I haven't tried it myself, but presumably it should work)

dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd · February 21, 2016

4 hours ago, Zvon said:

That is the correct behavior of CapsLock

That's weird, because as far as I know caps lock is basically the same as holding shift. My old Mac behaved that way (but that was in the 90s), my Windows PCs too. It's only in Linux that I encounter this. They might all be wrong indeed, in fact that wouldn't surprise me. Their behavior suits my workflow though.

As for part 2, I'll look into that. Mint does have a "caps lock acts as shift lock" option, but that didn't do what I wanted. I'll just have to figure out what's what and see if I can get the caps lock button to work as shift lock then.

Thanks!

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EDIT : turns out the "caps lock acts as shiftlock" simply doesn't work in Mint. I'll have to look into Ubuntu and Debian to see if those have it too so I know where to report that problem.

I posted a duplicate topic on another forum (TS) and got some other replies there. In the end I got caps lock to act as shift lock with :

xmodmap -e "keycode 66 = Shift_Lock"

keycode 66 is the caps lock key on most (if not all) keyboards.

This didn't last past a reboot though, but on my Mint Cinnamon install it is possible to add that command in the startup applications list. So my problem is solved.