Swapping Caps Lock via SSH on GNOME | Generated by AI

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On Fedora 44 (GNOME/Wayland), I ran this over SSH:

export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/$(id -u)/bus
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.input-sources xkb-options "['ctrl:swapcaps']"

How it works:

  1. DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS — SSH sessions don’t have access to the GNOME desktop bus. Setting this env var points to the running user’s D-Bus socket so gsettings can talk to the GNOME session.

  2. gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.input-sources xkb-options — GNOME’s keyboard settings stored in dconf. The xkb-options key accepts a list of XKB options.

  3. ctrl:swapcaps — XKB option from xkeyboard-config that swaps the Caps Lock and Left Ctrl keycodes at the input layer. Works on both Wayland and X11.

Persists across reboots because it’s stored in GNOME’s dconf database (~/.config/dconf/user).

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