Make Caps Lock Into Control

grrr: After using this for a while, I noticed that xmodmap settings don't get restored after suspend/hibernate. This is annoying, but once you figure out what's going on it's easy enough to run xmodmaprc ~/.xmodmaprc manually. So I'm still using it, it's just not as cool as I thought at first. I imagine there's some way to hook this into the resume scripts....


There's no use at all for the Caps Lock key, once you are old enough NOT TO THINK THIS SORT OF THING IS CLEVER, and in fact having it usually causes problems.

You can make it into another, much more conveniently positioned Control key using an ~/.xmodmaprc file, which should contain the lines:

clear Lock
keycode 0x42 = Control_L
add Control = Control_L


That's it. xmodmap will execute the commands when the X server starts.

Either log out and log back in again, or use:

$ xmodmaprc ~/.xmodmaprc

to run that file explicitly, and from now on, any application running under X will see your Caps Lock key as a Control key instead.

This makes emacs enormously more pleasant to use.

Emacs 24.3.1 and Octave 3.8.1 Inferior Octave Hangs

With GNU Emacs 24.3.1 and GNU Octave, version 3.8.1 an attempt to execute a line of octave hangs, with the inferior octave buffer displaying the welcome text.

This is because they disagree on what the prompt should be:
Creating a ~/.octaverc with the line PS1(">> ") should fix this:

$ cat >~/.octaverc
PS1(">> ")