I have a little one-line keyboard customization in my ~/.profile that is intended to make my caps lock key function as escape when pressed or ctrl when held.

# Map Caps Lock to Esc/Ctrl
setxkbmap -option 'caps:ctrl_modifier' && xcape -e 'Control_L=Escape;Caps_Lock=Escape'

It works… but only if I manually run source ~/.profile. The weird thing is that it kinda works without the manual intervention, but the caps lock also activates. This does not happen after manually sourcing.

I thought this file was automatically sourced at login. If that’s the case, shouldn’t the customization work automatically without the file having to be manually sourced? Is there some service that needs to be running before this command fires that is not yet running when the file is automatically sourced? Struggling to understand what’s happening here… 🤔

  • RadDevonOPEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Hmm. I don’t seem to have that file, so I guess that means I’m not using gdm? I haven’t changed the login manager, so it’s whatever comes out of the box with current Pop_os.

      • RadDevonOPEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Ah, OK. I’ll give this a shot. I found a solution (posted in the comments), but I don’t love it because it depends on a sleep and isn’t deterministic. Thanks!

        • RadDevonOPEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          For anyone who happens to find this later, putting it in ~/.xprofile did not work for me, so I’ll still with the other solution I posted here for now.