Yeah, weird to see someone who appreciates the end key but not the home key.

Insanely useful editing CLI

Agreed, but I am more of a "Shift + I" kind of guy

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.

Apple didn’t think so on the iPhone

PgUp and PgDn are also extremely useful when scrolling through logs

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.

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

Seriously this was my first thought.

I actually remap PgDn/PgUp to Home/End on my poorly-designed keyboard that lacks those

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

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

ins for vim. quickly changing between replace and insert mode

I used ins all the time before I moved to 65% keyboard. All of those times were accidental when hitting backspace

Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert ist like Ctrl-C Ctrl-V, but it works in terminals too. Very useful.

Yeah, how is "end" in god tier and "home" in replace tier? They're 2 sides of the same coin

Ctrl + A

I use vi

I usually just navigate there with cd ~/ but on the other hand I have never even thought about home button. I'll start using that for now on :D

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.

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.

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

On SSH that button is a killer, even works in vim. For home I never found any use.

They are all useful, except for maybe Pause.

And Scroll Lock?

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.

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

F12 opens dev tools in most browsers, so I use that one all the time.

I'm pretty certain Excel supports scroll lock. It lets you scroll the sheet with the arrow keys instead of moving from cell to cell (also last time I tried you could go to the ribbon menu with the slash key, like in the good ol' Lotus 123 days). Wouldn't be surprised if it also works in other spreadsheet programs.

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.

These buttons are my livelihood

I love using zellij for this since you can quickly edit the scrollback buffer directly in your favorite text editor.

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!

What do you use it for

Ctrl+break doesn't do anything on my machine. Ctrl+c stops a process.

Raising elephants is so utterly boring.

I usually bind some toggled macros to it (e.g autoclicker). The lil' light really comes in handy for this use case. I also used it as my "mute" shortcut in various VOIP softwares for a while for the same reason

At least move the CAPS LOCK key. There’s no good justification for why it should be on the home row.

Fucks up what I expect the arrow keys to do in Excel is what.

Switches Excel to scroll the sheet with the arrow keys instead of moving from cell to cell.

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".

Well, Print screen is literally written on it, so you got what you wanted

Except in VS Code -.-

Too many years of Vim and now vim-keyed modern editors has resulted in the Insert key going ignored on almost every keyboard I've owned.

When I built a fancy ergo keyboard, it has arrow keys, pgup/down and home/end, but Insert is one of the few that did not make the cut, along with Caps lock, Scroll lock, Printscreen and Pause.

I do feel stupid for having left off the backtick by accident. Someday I need to remember to add it to the ~ key as a layer and recompile.

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 :(

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

PrtSc, so it's on Pirate's Screen.

I'm severely deutan, even then red and green are a clear difference. Yellow is a bit harder to see, but still visible. Should not be an issue unless you are suffering from dichromatism.

Right? Same with Home, I use that all the time.

Hey! Don't remove the context menu key, I use that! The alternatives are 1. using the mouse (no!) and 2. Alt+F10 which is awkward.

Caps lock is great for rebinding to Ctrl

Capslock is great for writing SQL.

HOW DO YOU YELL WITHOUT CAPSLOCK?

And the Pause key too!?

Capslock is mandatory. Acronyms, report writing with key words, and programming all make heavy use of fully capitalized words.

Super/Windows key isn't useless... It gives you another modifier key. Since apps don't really use it, you can use it for global shortcuts without the risk of collisions with shortcut keys that individual apps support like you would with Ctrl, Alt and Shift.

I have to disagree with the Windows key being useless. Win+Shift+S for selective screen grab to clipboard. Win+E to open a new Explorer window. Win+D to show the desktop. They were my go-tos. Now I'm forced to use Mac I use the Win key all the time too, Win+C, Win+V....

I use it to open the spell checker options while I'm typing. It's annoying to have to switch from keyboard to mouse. My current laptop doesn't have the key and I even added another short key.

The super key, again, is useful so you don't have to switch between keyboard and mouse when searching for an app. It is also the modifier for all GUI shortcuts.

I use the menu key in my terminal emulator to paste from the clipboard. Just Menu -> P. There's probably a shortcut, but this works.

According to the ancient list of standard keyboard shortcuts (generally made famous by Microsoft, but used elsewhere before and after), the context menu was Shift+F10 anyway. Plain F10 being the main menu. A context menu key wasn't really needed.

Even the Windows key had the alternative binding Ctrl+Esc for those people who had old keyboards. That's why Ctrl+Shift+Esc called up Task Manager. Related meanings and all that. Arguably though, the Windows key being associated with the space-cadet keyboard's Super functionality was a stroke of genius on the part of Linux adopters. It's also why Alt is often called "Meta".

I'm surprised the context menu key hasn't been called and used as "Hyper", but then there is only one on a modern PC keyboard. There's two of all the others.

(Given the precedent, Alt+F10 ought to be the window manager's "title bar" menu, but the Alt+F# shortcuts are a separate, older, family. Most aren't implemented by default these days, but the famous don't press it without thinking Alt+F4 to close the window is part of it. Alt+Space is what's used instead for the aforementioned menu.)

It's so useless that Microsoft recently announced it's going to replace it with a button for their stupid AI bullshit Copilot

Titan tier. I press it every time a program tells me to.

Really you just need a command key, get rid of the rest. Hold it down for different lengths of time to indicate which key input you want.

Good Tier, underused.

Gosh thanks. I was wondering why there are only two colors in this chart.