How to detect the status of the capslock in linux programmatically?

by coty_beier , in category: General Help , 25 days ago

How to detect the status of the capslock in linux programmatically?

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1 answer

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by brock , 23 days ago

@coty_beier 

In Linux, you can programmatically detect the status of the Caps Lock key by reading the state of the relevant keyboard LED. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to achieve this using the C programming language:

  1. Include the necessary header files at the beginning of your source code: #include
  2. Implement the following function to query the Caps Lock status: int isCapsLockOn(Display* display) { XKeyboardState xkb; XGetKeyboardControl(display, &xkb); return (xkb.led_mask & (1 << 0)); // The first bit corresponds to Caps Lock (0 indexed) }
  3. In your main function, open a connection to the X display server and call the isCapsLockOn function to check the Caps Lock status: int main() { Display* display = XOpenDisplay(NULL); // Open a connection to the X display server int capsLockOn = isCapsLockOn(display); printf("Caps Lock status: %s ", capsLockOn ? "ON" : "OFF"); XCloseDisplay(display); // Close the connection to the X display server return 0; }
  4. Compile the code: gcc -o capslock_status_capslock status.c -lX11
  5. Run the compiled program to get the Caps Lock status: ./capslock_status


The program will output "Caps Lock status: ON" or "Caps Lock status: OFF" based on the Caps Lock key's state.