If you have “Help” instead of “Ins”, replace it with Overgod-tier. Keep pressing it, it will come.

OC, feel free to share.

EDIT; Home is now G-od tier. I didn’t know it would go to the beginning of a line, I always used macros “lol”.

      • SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years ago

        Editing a line and pressing home to jump to the start of it is incredibly useful.

        More so when dealing with anything that was wrapped

        • rubicon@lemmy.ca
          0·
          2 years ago

          I have my left mouse wheel click set to home, and right mouse wheel click to end. That way I can decide if I want to be at the start of the line or the end.

    • Björn@swg-empire.de
      2·
      2 years ago

      Had to look for a new laptop for my wife. One of the requirements was a Home and an End key because both were missing on her old laptop for some inane reason. Not available with Fn, just nothing. Before that we wouldn’t even have thought of checking for that.

      • OmidMnz@lemmy.world
        English
        1·
        2 years ago

        You can add those as win+, or any other combination you like, using KMonad or Kanata, plus a lot of other shenanigans. But I guess having them natively is a lot easier for everyone involved.

  • Dandroid@dandroid.app
    95·
    2 years ago

    You don’t use Home? Home and End are my two most used keys on this list. IDEs move your cursor to the beginning of the line but after the indents. It’s God -tier.

    • DrM@feddit.de
      17·
      2 years ago

      PgUp and PgDn are also extremely useful when scrolling through logs

    • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
      17·
      2 years ago

      I second this! You’re not really a programmer until you know how to use home button.

      I don’t usually gatekeep, except to OP.

    • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
      11·
      2 years ago

      Home / End to navigate

      Shift home/end to select text

      add CTRL to navigate the whole doc / page

      add shift again to select whole page

      I use them constantly, but I’m flipping between excel (/sheets), web, CLI, GUI most days

    • brianorca@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 years ago

      I really miss home and end on my laptop keyboard. (Hate needing to use the Fn+Home key each time.)

    • tyler@programming.dev
      11·
      2 years ago

      On Macs you can just use command left and right. Reuse keys so I get more 😬

      I haven’t used literally any of the keys in this photo for years

      • Dandroid@dandroid.app
        2·
        2 years ago

        Well, sure. I type on my laptop that doesn’t have any of these as physical keys. It’s fn+arrow keys for pg up, pg down, home, and end, for example.

        • tyler@programming.dev
          1·
          2 years ago

          I use a crkbd/corne keyboard so I also don’t have these keys on there either. Just a waste of space imo. Clearly I’m in the minority though.

  • Dudwithacake@kbin.social
    38·
    2 years ago

    For those learning how good Home is, wait until you try CTRL + Home. Start of the file.

    Also see: CTRL + End

    • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
      13·
      2 years ago

      Exactly. I feel that people shaming all these extra buttons must have been raised in the era of smartphones. They are all so useful. Well, except Insert. I still don’t get the point.

  • crispy_kilt@feddit.de
    25·
    2 years ago

    They are all useful, except for maybe Pause. Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert ist like Ctrl-C Ctrl-V, but it works in terminals too. Home goes to the beginning of the line. Shift+Home marks the line from current position until the beginning.

      • dan@upvote.au
        17·
        2 years ago

        Scroll lock is useful for Excel. It makes the arrow keys scroll the spreadsheet without changing the currently selected cell. This was actually the original use case for the scroll lock key.

      • ggppjj@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        2 years ago

        It’s useful for UltraVNC to pass through key combos like alt-tab without triggering them on the local PC.

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
    24·
    2 years ago

    I use all of these keys except scroll lock. Mainly because there aren’t any software vendors that support the function anymore, and nobody has had the innovation to use it for anything new.

    I use insert regularly, delete all the time. Home and end, pretty much daily… Print screen sometimes (though I usually use a screen snippet tool instead), and pause is used in some keyboard shortcuts in Windows that are very helpful.

    Idk why we’re picking on insert and pause when F12 is right there. Seriously, does anyone use any F keys beyond F5? If you do, is your scope then limited to F1/F2/F5? Maybe add alt+F4?

    All the F keys do stuff. But in my experience, 90+ % of the time nobody knows what those things are. One of my personal favorites is F2 which is generally used as a shortcut to “rename”. It’s very helpful. Honorable mention to F5 for all the reasons you would expect.

    Meanwhile, there’s people like OP throwing shade at our good friend “home”… What are you saying OP? Are you to good for your home?

    • mrunicornman@lemmy.world
      81·
      2 years ago

      F9-F12 are useful when you’re debugging code in Visual Studio.

      I sometimes use F6 to jump to my browser’s address bar.

      Can’t imagine any uses for F7 or F8 though. And all the times I’ve opened a help screen with F1 have been on accident.

      My main gripe with function keys on laptops is they’re tiny and easy to mix up, especially since they have large brightness, volume, etc. icons on them while the function key number is a tiny label that’s barely visible.

    • Heavybell@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      I built myself a foot pedal that presses F14. It’s super useful as a global hotkey 'cause nothing else uses it. :P

      • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        This is good. I’ve been looking for a way to assign a foot pedal as a global mute toggle. This might be a good first step. I like it.

        Thanks for the idea.

        • Heavybell@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          I bought an existing foot pedal off aliexpress. It came with a little dangling wire, supposedly meant to be hooked up to a piece of industrial equipment. Opened it up, removed the existing wire, soldered a wire to a suitable arduino dev board and hot glued it inside. If you want I can dig up the exact parts I used and even the code. But I also suspect maybe you want to figure it out yourself?

          • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            Some bits I can certainly figure out. The Arduino code is the part I’ll be very bad at; so if you can get that without too much trouble, I would appreciate it.

            I’m sure I’ll use a different pedal than what you did, since I don’t know if the supply availability will be the same, but honestly, it’s just a fancy switch designed to be used by a foot, so I’m sure it’s nothing difficult.

            If it’s too difficult to find the code, no worries, I’m sure there’s plenty of examples around the internet of similar types of code for different purposes (like a shortcut keyboard or something). I’m certain that we’re not the first and certainly not the last to want something similar in function.

            • Heavybell@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              2 years ago

              Here’s the code I wrote:

              #include "Keyboard.h"

const char FUNCTION_F14 = 0xF1;
int down = 0;

void setup() {
  // make pin 2 an input and turn on the
  // pullup resistor so it goes high unless
  // connected to ground:
  pinMode(2, INPUT_PULLUP);
  // initialize control over the keyboard:
  Keyboard.begin();
}

void loop() {
  int nowDown = digitalRead(2) == LOW;

  if (down != nowDown) {
    down = nowDown;

    if (down) {
      Keyboard.press(FUNCTION_F14);
    } else {
      Keyboard.release(FUNCTION_F14);
    }
  }
}

              Note that the #include was meant to use angle brackets, but Lemmy ate them. If this doesn’t work, change it back to angle brackets around the Keyboard.h instead of quotes.

              Also, the parts I used:

              I wired it up like in the photo, and just laid it on a bed of hot glue so the USB port sticks out the hole. I had intended to get a mini USB extension cable inside the pedal, but the one I ordered turned up defective, and this worked out just fine.

              • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
                2·
                2 years ago

                Excellent. Thanks for digging this up.

                I’m just wondering what you used to bind F14 to do something on your PC? Some companion application?

                • Heavybell@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  2 years ago

                  I just noticed lemmy didn’t like the #include statement because it uses angle brackets. I tried to update it but it doesn’t look right, so I’m going to change it to quotes which should work the same, I believe. I’m not a C expert, I usually code in C#.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
      2·
      2 years ago

      Blender uses F11 to view render, F12 to render, and F9 to adjust last operation. Shift+F1 through F12 switches through different editors.

      And yes of course noone knows that, there’s not a single person in the world who knows all Blender shortcuts. More importantly though most F keys are unassigned which means you can bind something to it without unbinding something you never heard about.

      • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        I’m also IT, hello brother.

        I use the F keys all the time. I would argue that they were, and still are, function keys. They’re a built in set of hotkeys to functions. F1 was, and often still is, the hotkey for help. Most people simply default to the menu, about, help or whatever. Using their mouse instead of the keyboard. I find most help dialogs in Windows applications to be fairly useless. They’re often populated with incomplete and/or out of date information.

        F2 in operating systems is most often used for rename, in my experience. F4, specifically alt+F4 is close, F5 for refresh, F6 varies; the one I know is for the address bar in Chrome. Also in Chrome, F7 is caret browsing, and F12 for developer tools or diagnostics. The keys are not universal and change from app to app, as they should.

        IMO F-keys are unsung heros of advanced users, where the majority don’t even know what they are there for.

        I will agree and commiserate about bios being some selection of F2/F6/F8/F11/F12/delete. Often on a system I have not used in a while, I’ll just bang every one of those keys in an effort to get to some menu that will allow me to enter the BIOS/UEFI. It often works, other times I’m just staring at the screen until it tells me what to press, or frantically googling it while the system is shutting down, trying to find the right key before it gets to the BIOS loading screen.

        Good luck out there brother.

  • meteokr@community.adiquaints.moe
    20·
    2 years ago

    I use pgup/pgdn every day. Especially with terminal multiplexers, as I am unaware of how to view the scrollback buffer of long outputs faster than a quick couple of pgup’s.

    • KrapKake@lemmy.world
      6·
      2 years ago

      I remember at one point when I was younger and newer to computers I was typing a document for school and being driven nuts by the damn insert key. Like I had zero clue as to why everything I was typing was just being overwritten every time I needed to go back and change something. I still think the insert key is absolutey evil!

      • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
        English
        2·
        2 years ago

        I had a similar experience, but after I eventually figured it out, I grew to appreciate the insert key. Mostly because there were a few times when someone else was getting frustrated with the same problem and I was able to help them. It made me feel powerful; I had suffered, but I now possessed the knowledge to save others from the same fate.

      • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
        4·
        2 years ago

        Two things

        1. Overwriting existing text
        2. Some legacy scheduling software I use at work, where ctrl+ins inserts the copied day for a given coworker. Useful if you need to swap days in the schedule and a coworker has 3 different classes in as many rooms, and in some classes there are students from multiple courses. It’s archaic, but it saves time.
  • tsonfeir@lemm.ee
    12·
    2 years ago

    On a serious note, the PC keyboard seriously needs a revamp. Scroll Lock? What does that even do nowadays?

      • commandar@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        I generally remap to swap caps lock with left control. Having control on the home row makes Ctrl shortcuts way less of a contortion act.

        Useful in general but especially so on laptop keyboards.

    • Dave.@aussie.zone
      1·
      2 years ago

      Scroll Lock? What does that even do nowadays?

      In Excel it pans the whole worksheet with the arrow keys instead of shifting the active cell.

      Same thing in Word, you can move around in the document without shifting your cursor position.

      It also does the same kind of thing in most editors where there is an “active editing position” vs a “view of the page”.

      • pixelscript@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        tbh I’ve been saved by VS Code ignoring a fat fingering of the Insert key by mistake far more times than I’ve actually wanted it to work as intended.

  • ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.comEnglish
    154·
    2 years ago

    Smells like windows if End is God Tier but Home isn’t. On the command line being without either would kill my speed something fierce

    • sushibowl@feddit.nl
      5·
      2 years ago

      Ctrl-a and Ctrl-e are much faster to type than home/end and do the same thing (assuming a standard readline-enabled command line).

      All the keys in the cluster above the arrow keys are really too hard to reach to be of real practical use, IMO. Actually that includes arrow keys as well. Just too far from home row.

    • Taleya@aussie.zone
      1·
      2 years ago

      Not even just windows - i’ve used it a lot on windows systems - but yeah, this rather carries the scent of a skills issue

  • DudeDudenson@lemmings.world
    10·
    2 years ago

    My work laptop has pg up and pg down as a secondary on the up and down arrows. It’s such a threat to be able to move up and down a page with just pressing fn and the arrow keys

    • PoopMonster@lemmy.world
      8·
      2 years ago

      This comment just gave me ptsd due to a shitty keyboard I had growing up, they decided to put the sleep button (is that even still a thing? 👴) right next to the delete key I hit that thing on accident so many times :(

      • WbrJr@lemmy.ml
        2·
        2 years ago

        I have a power key on my Logitech keyboard. (K800 or something?) As far as I could find out, I could not turn it off, but you can change the action. Like sleep, shutdown, and restart or something… very… interesting feature?

    • cum@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      Woah buddy, no need to be so threatening to these innocent web pages