Turn off Caps lock when Escape is pressed

In X11 (on console I don't know) you can do it by redefining the behaviour of the Escape key. I looked at the "shift(break_caps)" definition to see how it works, and adapted it.

Look at this answer on xkb for more details on how/where to put the locally modified files and load them.

And for doing what you want, you need in the local symbols file (eg: ~/.xkb/symbols/mysymbols) a section like this:

partial modifier_keys xkb_symbols "esc_breaks_caps" { key <ESC> { type = "ALPHABETIC", actions [Group1] = [ SetMods(modifiers=none), SetMods(modifiers=Lock,clearLocks) ] }; }; 

and in the local keymap file (eg: ~/.xkb/keymap/mykbd; you can create it with setxkbmap -print > ~/.xkb/keymap/mykbd ) change the xkb_symbols line to add +mysymbols(esc_breaks_caps).

You can now load it with: xkbcomp -I$HOME/.xkb ~/.xkb/keymap/mykbd $DISPLAY and pressing Esc will remove the CapsLock state (actually, the effect happens on the release of Esc; I think that only modifiers keys have immediate effect; others the effect is after their release.)

Oh, if you want to also swap Escape and CapsLock keys; then use this instead (and you put "+mysymbols(esc_swap_and_breaks_caps)" in your mykbd file):

partial modifier_keys xkb_symbols "esc_swap_and_breaks_caps" { replace key <CAPS> { type = "ALPHABETIC", symbols = [ Escape, Escape ], actions [Group1] = [ SetMods(modifiers=none), SetMods(modifiers=Lock,clearLocks) ] }; replace key <ESC> { [ CapsLock, CapsLock ] }; }; 

note the physical keys are <CAPS> and <ESC>; <CAPS> (key engraved CapsLock in your keyboard) send Escape and <ESC> (key engraved Esc) sends CapsLock, whith <CAPS> (sending Escape) also unsetting capslock state

Add these lines to ~/.Xmodmap :

clear lock keycode 0x42 = Escape 

Then, type the command:

xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap 

Your Caps Lock key is now remapped to the Esc key.

Reference url.

Also go through this nice article about Mapping CapsLock to Escape in Ubuntu, which seems to be a unix.se user :)

I'm not sure if this answers your question, but to map the Esc function to the CapsLock key, you can use this:

setxkbmap -option "caps:escape"