CapsLock as Ctrl on a Linux server console

The Ctrl key is now universally placed by keyboard manufacturers in the wrong place, on the bottom row. For decades I’ve been tweaking my Linux (and even Windows!) installations to make the CapsLock key act as a Ctrl key, since it’s where the Ctrl key used to be (and should be) before IBM’s bone-headed decision to move it in the late 1980s on their PS/2 computer. This is easily done in the popular desktop environments like Mate and KDE, using their respective keyboard layout configuration tools. But it’s also useful to do the CapsLock-as-Ctrl trick on a server with no GUI, i.e., only a Linux text console.

The technique for doing this is something I’d used decades ago but forgotten until yesterday. It involves using loadkeys to modify the kernel’s keyboard mapping tables. Here’s a one-liner that does the job:

(dumpkeys | head -1 && echo "keycode 58 = Control") | sudo loadkeys

Note that this will not work in a GUI desktop terminal session; dumpkeys will issue this error:

Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console.

I tested this on Fedora 42 Server running in a VM, and I’m pretty sure it would work on bare hardware, too.

As long as we’re talking about the Linux console, I should mention that the lack of mouse-based cut, copy, and paste operations can be annoying. But one workaround is to use GNU screen and its copy/scrollback mode. It’s not as convenient as using a mouse, but it’s certainly usable. The screen man page has the details.