Awesome Window Manager Caps Lock icon

Question

i just got a thinkpad x120e. there is no led for when the caps lock key is on.
does anyone know if there is a way to show an icon in the wibox when the caps lock is on?

Answer 1

You could also check it with a little help from xset
#!/bin/bash
# Here's a example in bash, doesn't do much more then just echo on or off
CAPS_STATE=$(xset q)
PATTERN='Caps Lock:\s+(on|off)'
if [[ "$CAPS_STATE" =~ $PATTERN ]]; then
# Match
echo ${BASH_REMATCH[1]}
exit 0
else
# Nothing...
exit 1
fi
You could call that shellscript for your widget to get caps lock's state.
Or you could run xset q directly from lua in your widget and
take care of it there and have one script less to care about
Since I haven't done anything else in lua other than the settings
for awesome.. this can likely be done better
function caps_is()
local f = io.popen("xset q")
for line in f:lines() do
local _, _, caps_state = string.find(line, 'Caps Lock:%s+(%w+)')
if caps_state ~= nil then
f:close()
return caps_state
end
end
f:close()
return "unknown"
end