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”.

  • Dandroid@dandroid.app
    95·
    1 year 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·
      1 year ago

      PgUp and PgDn are also extremely useful when scrolling through logs

    • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
      17·
      1 year 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·
      1 year 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·
      1 year 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·
      1 year 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·
        1 year 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·
          1 year 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.

  • crispy_kilt@feddit.de
    25·
    1 year 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·
        1 year 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·
        1 year 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·
    1 year 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·
      1 year 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·
      1 year 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·
        1 year 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·
          1 year 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·
            1 year 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·
              1 year 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·
                1 year 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·
                  1 year 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#.

    • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      IT here. I use the F keys any time I have to change bios or bootloader settings, which is about once a month. Worst part is that no manufacturer uses the same F keys for getting into the bios/boot settings, and no bootloader either, windows and Dell change theirs over time. One Generation it’s F6 to get into the bios, the next it’s F8, and then a generation later it’s Del. Sometimes it’s F2 and F10 or F11 and F12; and almost never F3, F4, F7.

      On a more positive note, Autodesk uses the F keys as hotkeys to toggle settings quickly, which is nice when I put on my drafter hat. I imagine a lot of technical software has figured this out.

      I remember using F2 quite often when I was younger, but I can’t remember why. I think it might have been New Game in a lot of the Windows built-in games?

      That all being said… I get that these keys were originally intended for software to assign to whatever software-specific functions, as a kind of “Function keys,” but we’ve evolved since then, and I much prefer the laptop scheme of having an extra key on the bottom row that modifies all other keys as a kind of “Function key” instead of 12 that don’t do anything specific. Of the uses listed above, BIOSes/bootloaders don’t have to use F keys instead of regular ones–except possibly standards requiring the other keys to always output specific characters even when the software can’t use it, but if that’s the case I’d love to see the devs all agree upon which keys open bios settings and which accesses the boot order menu.

      • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        1 year 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.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
      2·
      1 year 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.

  • meteokr@community.adiquaints.moe
    20·
    1 year 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·
      1 year 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.netEnglish
        2·
        1 year 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.

  • tsonfeir@lemm.ee
    12·
    1 year ago

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

      • commandar@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year 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·
      1 year 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”.

  • ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.comEnglish
    154·
    1 year 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·
      1 year 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·
      1 year 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

      • pixelscript@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year 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.

  • DudeDudenson@lemmings.world
    10·
    1 year 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·
      1 year 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·
        1 year 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·
      1 year ago

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