How do I turn off Caps Lock (the lock, not the key) by command line?

bake_betty

For some reason my laptop is stuck in Caps Lock. I have the Caps Lock key mapped by xmodmap to hyper_l , so I don't have a caps_lock key to turn it off. Is there a way I can turn it off by command line? It would be nice if I could reset the lock state without resetting my computer, especially for future reference. This has happened before, but I would like to know now how to do it properly this time.

Originally asked by Echogene on Stack Exchange (askubuntu) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

I don't know of any command line tool for that in Ubuntu. (For Num Lock, there is numlockx .) Here's a one-liner that you can copy-paste into a terminal window: python -c 'from ctypes import *; X11 = cdll.LoadLibrary("libX11.so.6"); X11.XOpenDisplay.restype = POINTER(c_ubyte); display = X11.XOpenDisplay(None); X11.XkbLockModifiers(display, c_uint(0x0100), c_uint(2), c_uint(0)); X11.XCloseDisplay(display)' Here it is again in a more expanded form. We use the Python ctypes library to call C functions from the X library directly. The function XkbLockModifiers changes the state of the keyboard locks, on the core keyboard ( XkbUseCoreKbd = 0x0100), affecting Caps Lock (2), setting it to 0 (off)....

Full answer by Gilles 'SO- stop being evil': https://askubuntu.stackexchange.com/a/80301 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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