Configuring numlock indicator in KDE4

My brother has this really neat wireless keyboard with built-in trackball for his mediacenter. There is only one downside: it doesn’t have a numerical keypad and you never really know if the numlock is on or off. I think it is off at boot, but after turning it on and logging on, it is off again, unless you did a reboot.. or something like that.. Anyway, since it can be quite a challenge to enter passwords correctly, I started looking for a numlock plasmoidish solution.

First thing that turned up in the searches was the Keyboard Status applet. However, in the comments someone rightfully asks why it doesn’t use the keystate DataEngine. Great idea, because this is already packaged with vanilla kde. So I started searching for a general LED plasmoid which I could connect any datasource to using some mapping. No such luck. But then I wondered: why would someone write a plasma DataEngine and then not use it? 🙂 There must be some existing plasmoid! It turned out to be the Key State plasmoid which is currently hosted at gitorious.

Since it is a javascript plasmoid, you can install it as follows:

git clone git://gitorious.org/keystate/keystate.git
plasmapkg -i keystate

Done! It should now be in the list when adding plasmoids under the name “Key State”. You can configure a custom color for each special key. There are some advanced options as well which I didn’t try out. Here is what it looks like:

A simple rectangle shows my numlock is active. I know, nothing fancy but it’s all we need and it does the job! Thank you Martin Blumenstingl. 🙂