After encountering some issues with Ubuntu on my Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th-gen, I went back to Arch linux. So far, I'm loving it, but I did have to figure out a few things. This is meant to document a few things I did to customize the machine to my liking.

Re-mapping CapsLock to Ctrl

My brain is very used to the caps lock key being the control key. When this is not remapped, I end up constantly switching into all-caps mode and being very confused when things don't work correctly. I used interception and the caps2esc plugin to make the re-mapping work in a virtual console as well as in X.

First, install caps2esc (I use the yay package manager): I picked the community/interception-caps2esc package, which was option 1 in the yay listing.

$ yay caps2esc

Next, configure the re-mapping. I use -m 1 to disable the mode where pressing esc turns on caps lock, since I like the escape key to just remain the escape key and don't really need caps lock. This configuration goes into the file /etc/interception/udevmon.yaml:

- JOB: intercept -g $DEVNODE | caps2esc -m 1 | uinput -d $DEVNODE
  DEVICE:
    EVENTS:
      EV_KEY: [KEY_CAPSLOCK]

Finally, enable and activate the udevmon service, and enjoy no-more caps lock:

$ sudo systemctl enable udevmon
$ sudo systemctl start udevmon

Auto-suspend on low battery

Occasionally, I leave my laptop with the lid open for a reason. Other times, I just forget about it. I always feel bad coming back to a dead computer with a battery at 0%, since this can reduce the lifetime of the battery.

To prevent this, I have a script which will auto-suspend my computer if the battery level drops too low. I use this script (which I put into my ~/bin/auto_suspend.sh and made executable with a chmod u+x):

#!/bin/bash

battery_level=`cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity`

if [ "$battery_level" -le 5 ]
then
  notify-send "Battery critical. Battery level is ${battery_level}%! Suspending..."
  sleep 5
  systemctl suspend
elif [ "$battery_level" -le 8 ]
then
  notify-send "Battery low. Battery level is ${battery_level}%!"
fi

To run this script periodically, I used systemd timers (since Arch does not come with a cron daemon installed in the base system). First, I created a unit file for my auto-suspend service, in ~/.config/systemd/user/auto_suspend.service:

[Unit]
Description=Checks battery and suspends if low

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/home/igor47/bin/auto_suspend.sh

Next, I created a timer which will periodically activate this service (in ~/.config/systemd/user/auto_suspend.timer):

[Unit]
Description=Check battery level and auto-suspend

[Timer]
OnBootSec=1m
OnUnitActiveSec=1m

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

My config will activate the timer 1 minute after boot-up, and also 1 minute after every activation. I then enable the timer:

$ systemctl --user daemon-reload
$ systemctl --user enable auto_suspend.timer
$ systemctl --user start auto_suspend.timer

You can check the status of the timer like so:

$ systemctl --user list-timers