I can’t remember when it was the last time I needed the Caps Lock key on my keyboard. For ages, I have been using support in Linux and Mac OS X to make Caps Lock behave as an additional Control key.

Windows doesn’t seem to have built-in support for doing this so I had to resort to an external utility named Ctrl2Cap by Mark Russinovich, available at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897578.aspx. Ctrl2cap is a kernel-mode device driver that filters the system’s keyboard class driver in order to convert caps-lock characters into control characters. People like myself that migrated to NT from UNIX are used to having the control key located where the caps-lock key is on the standard PC keyboard, so a utility like this is essential for our editing well-being.

Another option which does not require installing any drivers (that might potentially cause harm) consists of applying a change to the Windows registry. I learnt about this technique from http://blog.horie.to/2012/06/make-capslock-additional-ctrl-in.html:

Modifying registries may cause system failures. Please take full responsibility for your actions.

1. Run regedit.exe
2. Create a new binary entry named “Scancode Map” under “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlKeyboard Layout”
3. Input following binary code and close regedit.exe

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
03 00 00 00 1D 00 3A 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

4. Sign out, then sign in