Disabling Caps Lock leaves a brief moment where symbols become numbers

Ask Fedora
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1

Hello, I’m using Fedora 42 KDE. I’m using a French keyboard.

My problem is this:

  • When I press the Caps Lock key to disable it, there’s a brief moment when, if I try to type the apostrophe symbol ('), it types 4 instead. For example, in French, I want to write “J’ai” but instead, with my typing speed, it comes out as “J4ai”.

Some background:

  • I had a previous problem where pressing Caps Lock to type a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence would result in a second or even a third capital letter, even though I had pressed the key again and therefore disabled Caps Lock after the first capital letter.

  • I installed a package that allows me to have a new Caps Lock behavior to solve this: “Make Caps Lock an additional Ctrl key, while still identifying it as Caps Lock.” This package fixed my double or triple capitalization problem.

I’ve tried to find solutions using generative AI, just by searching and clicking, looking at the forums here, but I haven’t found anything. I should point out that I’m a complete beginner.

2

What you’re seeing here is that by default in KDE Plasma, when you press down and release the Caps Lock key to change the state, the change happens on the release of the key, not on the press-down (like it does in Windows and possibly other Linux DEs).

So, if you press Caps Lock and then press ' before releasing Caps Lock, then you get 4 instead of your intended '.

You might want to make Caps Lock operate at the time of press instead of the time of release. The KDE forum thread below shows a way to do this. (I haven’t tried this myself.)

As shown in the thread, you would create a couple of new config files (see details in the thread) and edit the file ~/.config/kxkbrc.

2 Likes
3

It didn’t work and it crashed KWin, rendering my keyboard unusable. I had to delete the folders I had just created.

For your information, when I say I’m using KDE, I mean KDE Plasma. I’m running Fedora 42.

4

Ah, sorry about that.

I know :slight_smile: “KDE Neon” is an Ubuntu-based distro that uses KDE Plasma. This issue is probably pretty consistent on Plasma across different distros.