The first thing anyone who is a heavy Emacs user does when they get a new computer is figure out how to map CapsLock to Control. The alternative is severe pain in the hand from constantly having your pinky bent under your palm trying to reach the Control key. Just thinking about C-q makes my hand hurt. I'd hadn't been able to find an acceptable mapper for OS X until today.

I found out about a little tool called uControl this morning and loaded it up. The installation is easy and the integration with the OS X preference system is seamless. It just shows up in the System Preferences and works. Make sure you remember to "Add" your mapping after clicking the check boxes to create it. I couldn't get it to work for a minute and that was the problem. The little CapsLock light still toggles, but I fired up Emacs and the mapping worked like a charm. I tried it with an external USB keyboard as well as the bult-in keyboard and it worked just fine.

This is another example of OS X being a Unix that just about anyone could use. If you've done keymapping in X, you know what a joy it can be--I have to dig into the manual page every time and relearn it. This morning's exercise couldn't have been simpler.