I got me one of those programmable keypads, an ELSRA PK-2068. It works well, relatively easy to program.

So, I programmed one of the keys to "gedit file_blahX &" and it works.

(note that blahX has 4 lower case letters and one upper case one)

Until, I had the main keyboard on "Caps Lock" state.

What I did was a combination of ctrl-A alt-U alt-l etc here and there, and I
could make it work, but it is incredibly tedious and error prone.

I looked high and low for a command to flip Caps-Lock to lowercase, but
had no luck. I did find for TOGGLING the caps-Lock state, but then that
would not work on my keypad if the main keyboard was already lowercased.

Anyone know of a command to force the keyboard to Lowercase?

probably here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...sing-x-windows
or here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...ocks-in-python

Yes it's strange. I saw xset can query if caps lock is on or not and xdotool can toogle it. But you can combine them, with something like this:

That works. Now to figure out how to program something like that into the keyboard. This particular kbd
is limited to 32 characters per key. To be portable, ie, moving the keypad from one computer to another
random computer, would be difficult. Otherwise, yes, I could trigger a script like that.

Let me do some thinking.... Perhaps one key uploads the script for the session.

I was hoping that some sort of obscure key combination like ALT-CTL-RSHIFT-F5 would do it across Mint,
or even Debian ...

What I done so far is to set an alias="your command above".
That works.

Not exactly portable, but much better.

I also looked at the Mint shortcuts in the control panel. Looks dangerous, I saw a few
conflicts in there with standard usage in bash.