I found mapping Caps to Ctrl caused too much RSI.

It's better to use a full size keyboard and use two hands for keyboard combos, e.g. for Ctrl+A use right Ctrl, for Ctrl+N use left Ctrl, for Ctrl+E use right control. Takes a little while to master but it puts much less pressure on your fingers.

Mapping Caps to Esc is a good choice though.

It also makes it easy to use Ctrl-[ instead of reaching for ESC, which as a heavy Spacemacs and iTerm user is a lifesaver for me.

Or to esc. Saves my vim pinky a lot of grief.

> Or to esc. Saves my vim pinky a lot of grief.

FWIW, Ctrl-[ emits the ASCII code for ESC. So you can save that 'vim pinky' and have the remainder of control codes available to you as well :-).

I forget what the tool was, but I recall someone mentioning they mapped CapsLock to ESC when tapped, and to Ctrl when held.

It's Karabiner Elements on the Mac.

On Linux you can get it to do the same thing with a combination of xmodmap, setxkbmap and xcape (but it's fiddly) and on Windows with AutoHotkey (but it's fiddly) — neither are as easy to use as Karabiner Elements, but they do work.

Always the first thing I do on any new system. Caps lock is the most useless key in the most prime real estate.

If you have a touchbar remap it to esc. I swapped my MBP for an air but kept the remapping.

with Karabiner, you can make it so that a tap of caps lock emits an escape, while still being able to use it as a ctrl modifier when pressed in conjunction with other keys: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/document.html#configuration-c...

I don’t think karabiner elements supports that and I believe that the old karabiner no longer works with current versions of Mac OS

The latest version of Elements has supported this for several months, if not longer (I think they'd made it work for High Sierra at least, but I could be wrong about the exact timing.)

I use it for both Caps Lock -> Escape/Control and Return -> Return/Control and it's indispensible.

This is brilliant