setcapslock

Small utility to set the caps lock state in an X session.

The setcaps function is stolen from here: http://askubuntu.com/a/80301

Usage

Turn caps lock on:

setcapslock on

Turn caps lock off:

setcapslock off

Toggle caps lock:

setcapslock toggle

Show current state:

setcapslock get

And best of all: these commands are case-insensitive, of course!

Install

To build the binary type:

make

Alternatives

I came by the following suggestions for alternative solutions (none of which ended up working for me):

• setleds -caps (setleds complains about not being in a virtual terminal)
• xkbset nullify -lock (I don't have xkbset in repositories, so cannot verify)
• xset led named 'Caps Lock' (does not work for caps lock on my machine)

Turn off the key

Beware, this utility does NOT turn of your caps lock key. For this task I found either of the following commands sufficient:

• setxkbmap -option caps:none (or even better use "caps:escape" to reassign to escape key!) (see: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/75492)
• xmodmap -e "clear Lock" -e "keysym Caps_Lock = Escape" (the statements can also be put into .Xmodmap config file)

Toggle caps lock

According to this post the following commands can be used to toggle the caps lock state:

• xdotool key Caps_Lock (works for me!)
• xte "key Caps_Lock" (xte is in the xautomation package but complains about bad parameter on my machine)