The next Omarchy gives Caps Lock back, and compose moves to Shift + Caps Lock
Omarchy’s Caps Lock trick confused too many people, so DHH has merged a change that puts the key back to normal. The compose key, behind emoji shortcuts like M S for a smiley, moves to Shift + Caps Lock in the next version.
Photo: Adil Muthuvallur / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
One of Omarchy’s more surprising defaults is going away. “Caps Lock will be left alone by default in the next version. Too confusing for too many people,” the official Omarchy account posted on X on October 11, 2026. “Shift + Caps Lock will now be the compose key.”
Until now, Omarchy turned Caps Lock into the compose key and asked you to press both Shift keys together to get Caps Lock. Compose is the key that starts Omarchy’s quick emoji and text shortcuts, so pressing it and then M S gives you a smiley.
The change comes from pull request #14939, opened by DHH and merged into omacom/omarchy on October 11. Caps Lock goes back to toggling capitals, and the quick emojis and completions become Shift + Caps Lock followed by the letters, such as Shift + CapsLock M S.
The pull request explains that the standard XKB keyboard settings have no option for putting compose on the shifted Caps key. Omarchy therefore defines its own option, omarchy:shift_caps_compose, and uses it in the default Hyprland input config in place of the old setting.
If you override kb_options in ~/.config/hypr/input.lua, you keep your own setting. The manual’s hotkey tables have been updated, and the “Why isn’t Caps Lock working?” troubleshooting entry has been removed.
A lone Shift is no longer part of Caps Lock. According to the pull request, that clears the way for a follow-up change based on a community suggestion to use Shift to switch keyboard layouts.
The change is merged but hasn’t shipped in a release yet. At the time of writing, the latest Omarchy release was still 4.0.4, so you’ll get the new behaviour with the next version.
