Setup a Mute Indicator Light for Zoom with Hammerspoon
In this post, I’m going to show you how to set up a light that will turn on when you’re in a Zoom call. The color of the light will show your mute status, red will indicate that you’re muted, and green if you are not muted.
Because Zoom doesn’t provide a native interface for determining mute status, I will instead use a tool called Hammerspoon to accomplish this.
Note: Unlike most software for macOS, Hammerspoon requires a bit of effort to get working. Be ready to use of your terminal and favorite text editor to get Hammerspoon configured.
If you aren’t familiar with Hammerspoon, it can be a bit hard to describe. I think of it as a programmer’s multi-tool for modifying the behavior and extending the capabilities of macOS. Hammerspoon does this by exposing a large variety of macOS functionality via a clean Lua interface.
The malleable nature of Hammerspoon gives it a lot of power, but it also makes it hard to describe. You can use Hammerspoon to configure hotkeys, act as a window manager, set timers, track your time, automate tasks, create desktop widget and more. I learned how to use Hammerspoon via the excellent blogs posts “Give your computer superpowers with a Hypekey and Hammerspoon” and “Hammerspoon: A Better, Better Hyper Key”. I recommend these posts if you want to learn more about Hammerspoon after you read this blog post.
