Knowledge Base

I recently purchased a ThinkPad P50s and I love it! However, it doesn't have indicators for capslock and numlock. So I wrote a tool to simulate them! Keyboard-leds-trayicons is my solution. You can go install it in Devuan Ceres from my OBS. Reading the status of capslock and numlock is trivial on the command line:

xset q | awk 'function d2b(d,b) {while(d) {b=d%2b;d=int(d/2)}return(b)} /LED/{print d2b($NF)}'

The awk is there to convert the provided decimal value into a binary. But how do you poll this, and display it in your X11 session in an unobtrusive way? With a POSIX shell script, of course! But what about the actual icons? Use my fork of mktrayicon. My fork adds a few patches, and you can also get it at the OBS link above. Obviously most people have no need for this package. And by now anyone without the indicators probably doesn't need them. This project was 99% for myself, but I like to share. The default icons are a bit boring, which fits my style. But the tool uses the xdg icon spec, so you can add your own icons for capslock-on and similar. Patches are welcome to the project, so if you really think this package should include more icons, or use yours by default, please open a merge request!