Remap caps lock to control, and you'll be a lot more comfortable.
Unless you use that other text editor, you know, the one that makes you always have to reach for the escape key...in that case, I suppose you should map it to escape instead.
Except there's a 200ms delay on the Capslock key to prevent accidental activations. Because this is built into the hardware, it means that even if you remap, if you press the second key really quickly after the first, the character ends up getting inserted into your document. It's ridiculously annoying.
Apple released a firmware fix that makes the Capslock key behave normally if it's remapped in OS X. However, I don't use OS X, and the keyboard doesn't send the event until after the delay (if I just tap the key quickly, Linux/Windows don't see anything), so I assume it's some combination of keyboard firmware + OS X.
OS X turns off the delay if you map that key to something else. The only workaround I've found in Linux is to force the LED on with setleds so that the hardware thinks it doesn't need to enable the delay.
Not for me - I've had two Macbooks in the last two years for work, and both of them suffered this problem, which makes developing in Vim super annoying (I remap Caps_Lock to Esc).
Hear, hear. Remapping capslock to control is one of the first things I do upon setting up a new OS, and I use vim. ctrl+[ is equivalent to esc, and with the Control key easily accessible from the home row I still get to use the window manipulation features (which all use control chords) in Vim without inducing carpal tunnel syndrome.
Nonsense. Map caps lock to control regardless of whether you're an emacs or vim user. If you use vim, control+c does the same as escape and since vim does still use control sometimes, it makes sense to keep control easy to access and just use that (IMHO very easy to press) key combo instead.
Unless you use that other text editor, you know, the one that makes you always have to reach for the escape key...in that case, I suppose you should map it to escape instead.