Creating an RGB Keyboard Legend

I recently found this post, where user u/Rasie1 had created a script for displaying their i3 keybinds when certain modifier keys were pressed. I thought it looked really dope and that it would fit nicely with the rest of my keyboard-centric setup, so I made my own.

I decided to use OpenRGB for controlling my Blackwidow V2’s RGB, since it fits my needs very well and has been my main RGB solution since the beginning of my Linux journey. I also decided to write the program in python, since I could finish it quite quickly then.

I decided to tackle this task by letting OpenRGB switch between different modes corresponding to certain combinations of modifier keys. That way I could customize the lights with a GUI instead of messing with a YAML/JSON file that would get really messy really fast.

During a first run, the program will create the needed profiles in OpenRGB. After that, you can go in and customize them in the OpenRGB application.

Important

You need to have the OpenRGB server running for this program to work. Launch it with the --server option to start the server.

The code is:

#!/bin/python
from openrgb import OpenRGBClient
from pynput.keyboard import Key, Listener

class Handler():
	def __init__(self):
		self.mod = False
		self.ctrl = False
		self.shift = False
		self.rgb = OpenRGBClient()

		for i in ["Mod", "Mod+Shift", "Mod+Ctrl", "None"]:
			try:
				self.rgb.load_profile(i)
			except ValueError:
				self.rgb.save_profile(i)

	def updateKeys(self, key, press):
		if key == Key.cmd:
			self.mod = press
		if key == Key.ctrl:
			self.ctrl = press
		if key == Key.shift:
			self.shift = press
		self.choose_profile()

	def choose_profile(self):
		if self.mod:
			if not (self.shift or self.ctrl):
				self.rgb.load_profile("Mod")
			elif self.shift:
				self.rgb.load_profile("Mod+Shift")
			elif self.ctrl:
				self.rgb.load_profile("Mod+Ctrl")
		else:
			self.rgb.load_profile("None")

if __name__ == "__main__":
	h = Handler()
	def on_press(key):
		h.updateKeys(key, True)

	def on_release(key):
		h.updateKeys(key, False)

	with Listener(on_press=on_press, on_release=on_release) as listener:
		listener.join()

Result:

Note

It is also quite nice to have it launch on startup, so I made a special .desktop file that launches OpenRGB with the --server option alongside this program and placed it in ~/.config/autostart/.