How can I remap the Caps Lock key in Mac OS X Lion?

Question

I would like to remap the Caps Lock key to some other unused key (in a system-wide fashion).

Being a MacVim.app user, I always liked to idea of remapping the Caps Lock key to some other key such as the "Help" key or the "End" key in order to use that piece of keyboard real estate to enter and exit insert mode.

Previously, in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, several options existed to do this, such as the excellent PCKeyboardHack which enabled the user to chose the key code that the caps lock key would send to the OS and operated at the driver level it seems. Or the other tool called DoubleCommand. None of these options work anymore under Mac OS X Lion (Gold Master). I tried to install them none the less and ended up with a kernel panic.

The "Keyboard" preference pane in the system preferences of both versions of Mac OS X has the possibility of remapping the caps lock key built-in as you can see in these pictures. But only to one of the other three modifier keys: namely "Control", "Command" and "Option". This is evidently not sufficient for creating a macro in vim. The Caps Lock key needs to be remapped to some other non-modifier key.

Other answers found in previous questions often contain a suggestion to use the Ukulele tool. This program has never had the ability to remap the Caps Lock key.

Other keyboard modifying software such as Consistent Keyboards has similar functionality but will not solve the problem.

Any help greatly appreciated !

Solution 1

PCKeyboardHack for Lion released and works great!

Solution 2

PCKeyboardHack for Lion is done with development. Works Great!!!

PCKeyboardHack Support

Solution 3

PCKeyboardHack recently changed its name to «Seil»

KeyRemap4MacBook recently changed its name to «Karabiner»

Seil is used to change the special key CapsLock to a more useful key (such as Escape) whereas Karabiner is useful to remap almost any key (except CapsLock). You can bring back the functionality of CapsLock for example by pressing both Shift-Keys at the same time.