There are so many articles on the web about swapping/remapping keyboard layout. The thing is I found most of them working till reboot, working only on some specific distros, working partially (e.g.: clicking working fine but long press not), or not working at all 🙃 So here it is, the ultimate, 1min (if you’re drinking coffee in the meantime and don’t want to spill some on your super fancy and expensive keyboard ☕), copy paste solution to make CapsLock work as a Backspace 🎉 Or whatever key you want to swap/remap, you just need to know the right key name (how to get a list of valid x11 names).

Let’s start with some intro. I should tell you earlier that you need to use Xorg. If you’re a Wayland user I can only share this link and wish you luck 🤞 (just kidding, the solution from Tony Beta Lambda's should work just fine). Ok, back to the topic. The Xorg server uses the X keyboard extension (XKB) to define keyboard layouts, but where are we going to find the right layout file we need to update? It’s under X11 folder. What’s X11? It’s a protocol to handle drawing on a display and sending input events (keyboard/mouse clicks movements). To sum things up, Xorg is a server/application which uses X11 protocol. That’s why xkb is inside the X11 folder. You can learn a lot just by looking at a file path, don’t you? 😉

  1. Open your X11/xkb/symbols/pc file with the rights to edit.

     sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pc

  2. Find a key <CAPS> part and replace the second part of it with BackSpace. That’s how this line should look like after editing (reminder: you can update any key you want!).

     key <CAPS> {[  BackSpace,  BackSpace  ]};

  3. Clean the cache. We can find it under var/lib/xkb. The X server uses this directory to store the compiled version of the current keymap.

     sudo rm -rf /var/lib/xkb/*

  4. Reboot your system and enjoy your new ⌨ layout!

It’s worth adding that you may need to repeat this process after updating your system. You may say it’s not the most ultimate solution, and you’re right! Why don’t you share your ultimate below? 😉