Not really anymore nowadays. The Apple Extended Keyboard[0] did have that feature. Similarly, Cherry used to produce a lock variant of their MX switches[1] that could be used for a such purpose. However this switch really only ever saw use in industrial applications.
The short answer, no. The state of Caps Lock is entirely in host software, to the keyboard it is just another key.
To get what you’re looking would require some very expensive mechanical contraption to reflect the state of the LED. And then what if you have reassigned Caps Lock, as is common?
As cool as it might look it’s going to be a very limited niche.
USB HID does have codes for locking versions of Caps Lock, Num Lock, and Scroll Lock¹. OS X might support these, given that older Mac keyboards had locking Caps Lock. Linux doesn't².
I mean sure, in theory something else can activate caps lock. In practice, it's only ever activated through a button press on the keyboard used. Caps lock being activated by something else or being reassigned to another button is the edge case here.
As an alternative, my Surface Pro 3 has an LED on the Caps Lock key to indicate on/off. It is a terrible keyboard otherwise, but perhaps there's other keyboards out there with this feature.
Newbcake|2 years ago
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Extended_Keyboard
[1]: https://deskthority.net/wiki/Cherry_MX_Lock
epcoa|2 years ago
kps|2 years ago
¹ https://www.usb.org/document-library/hid-usage-tables-15
² https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.7.3/source/drivers/hid/h...
Cthulhu_|2 years ago
growingkittens|2 years ago
Siecje|2 years ago
It saves you from typing a couple characters and then removing them, fixing the caps lock state and re-typing them.