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I've recently remapped the Capslock key to Esc and it's great, but I also miss its actual functionality at times. So I wondered if it would be possible to make the Shift key behave as it does for keyboards on iOS, Android etc, where you just tap it twice and it behaves as the Capslock key until you double-tap it again.

I looked around on the internet and found nothing, looked around here and found this similar question, which addresses how to do it on Linux, and this one, which asks for the same procedure on Windows, but went unanswered. So here I am giving it another go.

Any ideas?

San Diago
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2 Answers2

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I use AutoIT to add a hotkey. Now, you could do double-shift, but I would recommend a combination of keys instead. Capturing a key like shift with a hotkey program will cause plenty of other problems.

Tools for doing so:

  1. HotKeySet function in AutoIt
  2. Keybinding Forum Post

Hope this helps

Matthew Williams
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    Thanks for the help, that's a good point about capturing the shift key. I'm going to try out your suggestion and if it works I'll accept the answer. Thanks again. – San Diago Apr 06 '17 at 16:56
  • AutoIt has a bunch of useful things that I use all the time. Another one is VoiceAttack. Its primarily billed as for games, but I use it to add granular voice control to my Systems Administration. – Matthew Williams Apr 06 '17 at 19:20
  • I ended up not using AutoIT but you sent me on a path where I ended up stumbling onto AutoHotKey, which, along with your suggestion for choosing a combination of keys instead of a double-tap, helped me solve the problem. So I accepted your answer, thanks a lot. For anyone wondering, I'll post what I did below. – San Diago Apr 06 '17 at 22:57
  • Ya, AutoHotKey is nice as well. Auto it has the same capabilities but does require more scripting and AutoHotkey does make it super easy. – Matthew Williams Apr 07 '17 at 14:10
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So I thought Matthew Williams had a pretty good point about going with a combination of keys instead of a double-tap, and it turns out AutoHotKey makes doing this ridiculously trivial. I just created a .ahk file with the following content:

+Capslock::Capslock
Capslock::Esc

That's the file in its entirety and it solves the problem perfectly. The first line is a shortcut for a Shift + Capslock combination, and it means that, when I press it, it makes Capslock behave as a normal Capslock key, but when I just tap it once, it behaves like the Esc key, also as intended.

I had originally remapped the Capslock key to Esc with SharpKeys, but this is an infinitely simpler and better solution.

San Diago
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