A simple CAPS LOCK widget for Awesome

Useful when you have a keyboard that does not have a CAPS LOCK indicator.

This widget is really simple and parses the output of xset to figure out whether CAPS LOCK is active or not. (Hint: you need the xset utility for this widget to work)

Installation

1. Ensure that xset is available to you on your system.
2. Copy capslock.lua in your ~/.config/awesome/ folder (e.g. by cloning this repository).
3. Restart Awesome (e.g. press modkey + Control or run awesome-client "awesome.restart()" from a terminal).

Usage

For Awesome 4.x, add the following to your ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua:

-- If you just copied the file in ~/.config/awesome
local capslock = require("capslock")

-- If you cloned the repo as a submodule in
-- ~/.config/awesome/external/capslock
-- local capslock = require("external.capslock.capslock")

-- more config here

    -- Add widgets to the wibox
    s.mywibox:setup {
-- more config here
      { -- Right widgets
        layout = wibox.layout.fixed.horizontal,
        wibox.widget.systray(),
        capslock,
-- more config here
-- {{{ Key bindings
local globalkeys = awful.util.table.join(
  capslock.key,
-- more config follows

Now, when CAPS LOCK is active, an uppercase letter A will be displayed

when CAPS LOCK is inactive, a lowecase letter a will be displayed:

These can be changed by changing the activated and deactivated attributes of the widget as Pango markup strings. You will probably need to adjust the forced_width attribute too.

For example:

local capslock = require("capslock")
capslock.forced_width = 35
capslock.activated = "<u>CAPS</u>"
capslock.deactivated = "<u>caps</u>"

When the mouse is over the widget, a tooltip that says Caps Lock on/Caps Lock off is also shown.

Contributing

If you have ideas about how to make this better, feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.