Karabiner-Elements works perfectly for me on 10.12 (I only use it to remap caps-lock to escape).

https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements

Karabiner-Elements is very unfinished/unpolished though. Like, way pre-Alpha.

It's great that Karabiner is being developed, but given the number of people that are surely using MS keyboards, the situation is rather untenable. The built in key re-mapping using system preferences, at least for my mechanical keyboard, simply doesn't work. This meant that when I upgraded to Sierra, I was left with no way to remap my keyboard.

Perhaps the moral of the story is that if you use an external keyboard, consider waiting on the upgrade to Sierra.

That's exactly what I use it for and just set it up yesterday. The instructions on the home page are fairly abysmal though.

Ditto to the readme on GH. The key (ahem) bits:

1. Create ~/.karabiner.d/configuration/karabiner.json 2. Put some stuff in it (my simple example below) 3. Install the app from the GH page.

Key definitions are in the source code, but if you check the Issues discussion on the Elements project, you'll probably find good examples to send you on your way.

Sample karabiner.json: { "profiles": [ { "name": "Default profile", "selected": true, "simple_modifications": { "right_option": "delete_forward" } } ] }

Try these instead :) http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/remapping-caps-lock-ke...

The next Sierra release might allow the Esc key to be remapped natively, through the Keyboard System Preferences...

I do a similar thing: Caps Lock mapped to Control on hold and also Escape on tap.

How did you manage to do that with Karabiner Elements?

Yeah, that's why I've provided the link :) Alternatives!

Seconding this. I'm now unable to use CAPS LOCK on my Mac as ESC, which makes using vim slightly more of a pain.

I upgraded to the Sierra beta yesterday and the i and h keys were reversed on my external mechanical keyboards. Seemed a bit strange.

Upgraded to the Sierra beta?

Why? The real thing has been out since September 20.

10.12.1 beta is already out

Happened to me too: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/64304

I downgraded to el cap solely because karabiner stopped working in sierra.

My 'a' key didn't work either. I filed a radar yesterday.

System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... > Set Caps Lock Key to Escape

I don't believe 'Escape' is one of the options. On macOS Sierra, as for every previous version for me, the only choices to remap through the prefPane are "Caps Lock", "Control", "Option", and "Command".

Hence why Seil/KarabinerElements is the first thing I install on a new Mac.

Apparently the latest beta (10.12.1) has support for this natively.

https://github.com/tekezo/Seil/issues/68#issuecomment-250195...

Interesting. It really has, but I didn't see it before.

I was using Karabiner to set caps lock to control AND escape when pressed independently, something extremely useful to use Vim and command line. This doesn't appear to be supported, unfortunately.

Oh, well then! Looking forward to the first Sierra update, in that case :)

I really did not expect Apple to finally fill this gap that has been around for so many years.

Yeah, sorry I didn't specify. I am running the latest macOS Sierra beta.

And at least for me, the system preference switches simply don't work for my external keyboard (it can't seem to fully understand the difference between an internal keyboard and an external keyboard).

OS X nor macOS have the option to set caps lock to escape. This is why people who want to do this use Seil or Karabiner Elements.

I map escape to jj which is pretty useful. Thanks to some article somewhere years ago fir that.