AutoHotkey Community

[Torben]

AutoHotKey is a fabulous program.
Even though I am a novice in programming I succeeded in making a simple CAPSLOCK INDICATOR in the program tray. I am using a wireless keyboard without led-indicators for Num-, Caps- or Scroll-Lock. The lock-indicator that came with the keyboard is rather clumsy and occupies quite a bit of the lower right part of the screen.

Here is my code

[Rajat]

yes this can be a bit of overkill. just put 'sleep, 500' inside the loop and that's more than enough rest for the CPU. even a 'sleep, 100' will do.
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[Rajat]

by the way u can use a tooltip just above the system tray to show the status of all three locks using minimal screen space.

remember to use:
coordmode, tooltip, screen
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[Chris]

Nice script. Here's another way to do it that doesn't use a loop. But it does use the keyboard hook, so if nothing else in the script needs the hook, it will take up more memory this way:

[Torben]

Thank you.
I am surprised to hear that the sleep command reduces the work load on the computer, but that’s probably because I know too little about how computers work.

I tested sleep with more values between 10 and 1000. With sleep 1000 on my computer the reaction time was a little slow, especially when you have to press CapsLock twice for instance when you pressed it accidentally and want to toggle it back at once. Up till 200 it worked quite well.

Thank you Chris for the alternative suggestion. A minor problem is that the on/off icon does not appear until you have pressed CapsLock once.

If the keyboard hook for CapsLock takes up more memory I guess it will be even worse when you add a NumLock and a ScrollLock indicator. But which solution strains the computer the most: 3 keyboard hooks or 3 repeating loops (with sleep 200)? Is measuring CPU time the appropriate way to decide?

/Torben

[Chris]

[Torben]

Thank you so much for the explanations and the script.
/Torben

[Atomhrt]

Here's my version for both Capslock and Numlock. Note that ico files are not used for obvious reasons. I used a 3 second display of the tooltip.

[Chris]

Looks good. I edited the post to make the section "code" vs. "quote" to preserve indentation.

[Torben]

The only disadvantage by using Atomhrt's script is that you can only spot the changes in the toggles for 3 seconds, while my intention was to make something like a led-indicator that constantly indicated whether or not the CapsLock (or NumLock) was toggled. You might of course modify my (or Chris’) script to show 4 four different versions of one icon depending on the combinations of CapsLock and NumLock status -- if you don't like to have an icon for each.

Atomhrt's script can be improved so that the CapsLock- and NumLock-status is displayed when the mouse hovers over the tray icon. Insert the code below just after the last “}” and before the “Gosub, DisplayTip ; Show Keys Status “: