I see no use for the numlock key, I’d rather just have the numpad on the whole time. Are there actually cases where it is useful or people who for some reason prefer their numpad turned off?
Yes, there are arrows on the numeric keyboard which can be used for various reasons, also home and end buttons.
10-key. Pretty useful for my job as a bookkeeper.
Right, but do you ever turn num lock off? I think the OP was trying to say it should just be stuck on because why would you use those arrow, home/end/pg up/etc buttons that kick in if num lock is off?
I can be useful. If NumLock is turned off you can use 2, 4, 6, and 8 as arrow keys for example. Although with most modern programs you can easily rebind keys so it’s more a thing of the past, like the “Pause” button.
A thing of the past? Pause is used a lot to pause games.
I have never seen pause used that way for modern games. Most of them just use
Escapeinstead, with pause being left for lower-system things like theREISUBsequence.Don’t know what to tell you, for me it often works. Maybe give it a try? Esc usually brings you to the menu, which implies pausing, but it’s separate from pause key.
I am an avid gamer and have never used that button to pause a game. Escape is the go to for that, no?
“A lot”?
Man, I’ve used F9 as a pause key more often than Pause.
I can’t even remember when I would’ve needed the arrow keys on the numpad.
My keyboard has also SysRq, Scroll lock and Pause/Break keys on top of the numpad, never needed any of them.
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@PlutoniumAcid Use F1 for keybindings of your own choosing. Unlike with NumLock, that actually works regardless of what kind of keyboard it is.
It depends on if you are a heavy mouse user or a heavy keyboard user and you are using a laptop with a restricted keyboard. Personally to scroll a document I prefer the buttons page up/down home/end. Often I also use those buttons to select big parts of a file that I want to copy. E. g. Shift+Ctrl+End form me is a useful combination. On the other hand I rarely use the numeric pad for numbers, but I also feel more comfortable typing with the left hand, I guess that a lot more people heavy keyboard user would prefer the numeric pad.
Yes the mouse is changing the habits for a lot of people, but the numlock may still be useful for some.
I don’t think I’ve ever used numlock for anything other than “oh shit, I must have accidentally hit it when I was entering numbers via 10 key so I need to turn it off.
I think it is still is useful, as some software still hasn’t figured out how to turn on numlock automatically, and for a few applications number pad scrolling can be better than the arrow keys, but it is probably less useful than the scroll lock key at this point.
Yes. On my keyboard there’s no separate “end” key, it’s part of 3 on the numpad, that key is very useful when using the terminal, because you don’t need to wait for 5 years for the cursor to make it to the end of your command.
Ctrl-e in bash is move cursor to end. Ctrl-a is like home.
emacs?!
set -o viunless you just want to see the world burn(I’m kidding, I use the emacs shortcuts in bash, but vim is my goto text editor)
Yeah I’m the same. Emacs shortcuts make a lot of sense for readline programs.
Reassign it to the NumLock key.
I’m too lazy to figure out how to do that
If you have keyboard software, you might be able to use that. I use autohotkey for reassigning keys. The script would be:
SetNumLockState, AlwaysOn NumLock::EndFor windows,
Just put it in a txt file after installing AHK and use .ahk at the end of the file name. There’s a way to make it the default script, but I think but I use just task scheduler to make it start on boot/login.
Chaotic neutral
Never used it, really inconvenient. Stays off here and now you gave me an idea to rebind to something useful.
I have a smaller keyboard that doesn’t have dedicated arrow keys, or any of the home, page up, etc. They’re all on the numpad, so numlock for me is very useful.
no use whatsoever. this is an artifact from the days when the arrows, etc. did not exist as separate keys.
It’s useful if you enable Mouse Keys mode. Which is useful if you find yourself without a working mouse for one reason or another.
For a full size, 104-key PC keyboard, everything that is mapped to the numpad is also somewhere else, and the keys are spaced out enough that you’d almost never need to turn off the numpad, so the key is just there for oddball legacy apps that do weird stuff. It was more important before IBM released the fully “modern” 101-key Model M.
For laptop keyboards and other reduced format keyboards that still include all or part of a numpad, it can still be useful. I actually use autohotkeys instead, but one of my budget mechanical keyboards only has the non-arrow nav keys and the rest are accessed by turning off NumLock.
I haven’t used numlock in years but I remember that for certain games that you played with the arrow keys, I preferred to use the arrows on the numpad instead of the dedicated ones.
And according to Wikipedia, the reason why numlock exists in the first place is the fact that certain keyboards didn’t have dedicated arrow keys, but did have a numpad. I guess numlock on full-sized keyboards is just a relic that keyboard manufacturers are schlepping around because it’s cheap enough to produce and doesn’t really hurt 🤷
You can still get some mechanical keyboards with numpads but not arrow keys, though since these are variations on compact layouts they tend to omit the numlock key as well.
Interesting. Most compact keyboards I’ve seen save space by removing the numpad, not the arrow keys. I assume you can emulate arrow keys by pressing some modifier key on those?
Exactly that. Royal Kludge makes one.
I think it’s a good layout. I have a tenkeyless at home and for some tasks I definitely miss the number pad more than I’d miss the arrow keys, especially since the number pad by design doubles as arrow keys and always has. I’ve seen even smaller keyboards that have numpads but not the number row, which would also be sweet. Reclaim some vertical deskspace as well as horizontal.
