
Nathan Wittstock
Why not take that useless key, and make it useful? The Compose Key—formerly present on many Unix keyboards of old—isn’t present on most modern laptops.
In XFCE, this is a little more cumbersome than Gnome, since there isn’t a graphical interface for setxkbmap
, but these two commands will swap the Caps lock for a compose key:
setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps # disables caps lock
setxkbmap -option compose:caps # sets caps key to compose
To make this active at login, you can add two entries to your “Session and Startup” -> “Application Autostart” available under the Settings Manager. I’ve named mine “compose1” and “compose2”, each containing one of the above commands. Now enjoy all those en-dashes you’ll surely be typing.