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What's A 'Scroll Lock' And Why Is It On My Keyboard?
Jeff Bauer writes "Today's article in The Straight Dope explains all
the weird keys that come with standard PC keyboards. Now if someone could just explain what the 'Alt Graph' key does on my Sun keyboard, enlightement would be at hand ..."
How you know it's TRUE Straight Dope:
/p," to display directory information a page at a time."
"In command-line environments such as DOS, the pipe symbol can add functionality to a DOS command. The way I most frequently use it is when doing a directory listing (DIR) on a large directory with hundreds of files. Say I type "DIR" at the command prompt like so:
C:\Una\Lesbian Porn>DIR
. . . then the 22,000 files in that directory scroll past so fast I can't see their names. However, if I apply the pipe function at the command prompt like this:
C:\Una\Lesbian Porn>DIR | more
. . . then the display will show me one screen of files at a time, with a "More" at the bottom. To display the next screen of files, I hit any key to continue, until all of the files in the directory have been listed (or I break, by pressing Ctrl-C). This is similar to using the "/p" modifier, such as "DIR
Not only do they explain it, but give a real life situation where it'd be useful! It's always hard to sort through 22,000 lesbian porn pics.
Scroll lock is alive and well. If you're on windows (insert joke), just click your mouse wheel.
--H
I've been wondering the same thing about my windows key.
I belive it has something to do with locking the scroll....
well, i couldn't find any other use for scroll lock or its two neighbors, so i remapped them to be volume controls for my soundcard.
Linux is to the internet as Duct Tape is to the Universe.
It locks the scoll, duh...
<> !*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<> ~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.
Why is there a num lock key? I know what it does, but really, it's pretty stupid to have. I don't know anyone who uses the keypad when they're not typing numbers.
The fact that it's off by default with xp pro makes me wonder even more.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
I find myself a little chagrined at the loss of the Insert key on modern keyboards. While perhaps not very important to the everyday computer user, I find myself missing a key feature (bad pun) without the key.
I would much rather lose the backtick and tilde keys as they serve less purpose than the SysRq key and MUCH less purpose than the Insert key.
Bring back the Insert key!
Every keyboard has it, somewhere on the upper right-hand side, and frankly, it's pretty useless. It was included on the original IBM PC (where it also had little point). Nowadays, Excel is about the only app that takes advantage of it. When you engage Scroll Lock and press an arrow key, the active cell remains where it was and the entire spreadsheet moves (without Scroll Lock, the active-cell indicator moves to the next cell). article here
Very handy key.. I press it twice and my Linksys KVM switches to the other system. Does it do something else?
Many people think that scroll lock is now useless, except in Microsoft Excel, but it does have a much more useful purpose, at least in Linux and perhaps BSD.
What the any key is for... duh!
I like replies better than Karma, even if they are flames, because that tells me I got someone thinking.
Whenever my lab partner does something good, I hit the props key. Sun machines are cool like that.
Are there any keyboards with either Tux on the "Windows" key, or labeled as its true name?
Something has to turn the Scroll Lock light on and off.
... how long Enlightment has existed for Sun machines? :)
i can now sleep calmly at night :D
You are confusing me with someone who cares.
It's always bugged me that Scroll Lock doesn't work in MS Word or in Visual Studio. (I know, I know.)
I'll be reading a document using the scroll wheel on my mouse, get tired of that particular method then switch to using the arrow key, which then jumps the view to the current cursor position, which is by now miles away from where I was reading.
Not exactly sure I'd remember to turn on Scroll Lock in the first place, but for read-only documents it might be a good default.
--H
Who's the smartass that switched "Caps Lock" and "Ctrl" keys?
I always thought alt-graph was basically another meta key, used for other character sets....
What I want to know, is what was the unnamed unlabeled key on my sun keyboard for? I forget where it was.. in the top left, I think, or bottom left, near there.. and it had no label.
What I really want to know.. is... was it the ANY key?
Sweet Jesus tell me what the 'Props' key does on Sun keyboards, for me it just beeps.
--- What
I'm still trying to figure out what this fucking window keys does.
oh... nevermind.
key combinations.
a+scroll lock = mutt
s+scroll lock = (insert x app here)
ifyou know how to remap your keyboard, using something like bbkeys, or whatever there is for gnome/kde is obsolete.
Lots of commands are mapped to WindowsKey+Other combinations.
Yet another link that Fark ran first, and Slashdot copied...
WHATISTHISCAPSLOCKKEYFOR?
The Danish keymap is the same on all PC's (and Sun Boxen as well), and we need Alt Graph to access the following characters:
\@${[]}|~?
Not sure about the US keymap, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to go without Alt Graph.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
This is all very interesting, but it still doesn't tell me anything about where the 'Any' key is...
To clean out after you keyboard gets too sticky from all that protein.
Thank you for refering to your computer as 'boxen'....Glad to see it becoming mainstream!
Thanks Again,
Ben
You know, it's not just a LISP or Python operator... some of us use it to write in our languages. Tres frequemment, sometimes. (I'm not French, but, similarly to French, my native language uses the grave accent - just not as often.)
Marcelo Vanzin
Such as Message Notification for Trillian and nice blinky light plugin for music in winamp.
Like I'll believe it has a use other than those...pfft.
that the 'SysRq' key stood for "System Requirements", and would tell you what kind of hardware you needed for a program you were trying to load. Jeez, I was way off!
The tilde still has some limited use in C++ (don't know about other C-based programming languages since I don't know any of the others...yet). It's how you indicate to the compiler that this is the destructor function for programmer-defined class. That way the instructions in the destructor are automatically executed when an object of the class goes out of scope (usually used for returning dynamically allocated memory). Example: MyClass(); //CONstructor
~MyClass(); //DEstructor
This space for rent...
I remember seeing a "turbo" key on an IBM keyboard once, it really had everybody confused.
you have FAILED IT. We need the you suck for posting ME TOO post.
WALLOW IN YOUR FAILURE
And now I will cheat the lameness filter, so die.
... do we have two Ctrl and Alt keys? Isn't one set enough? And while I'm at it, all these "exrta" keys are just damn annoying. Access to an application from a single button is meant for PDAs, not computers where everyting is a command or a click away.
"Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."
AltGr ("alternate graphic," although it should really be "alternate glyph") is used for entering extended characters beyond what the standard keyboard layout supports. It's equivalent to the X keysym Mode_switch. When you use the "US International" keyboard layout in Windows, the right Alt key becomes AltGr, which when pressed along with other keys produces various extended characters, including accented letters, special punctuation marks, and other fancy stuff without having to type in the ASCII value on the numeric keypad while holding the Alt key. On non-US keyboards, like the ISO Spanish keyboard on my Mac, some keys have extra characters printed on the key caps, indicating which character they generate while pressing AltGr.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Dear Straight Dope: Why does my computer keyboard have this "Scroll Lock" key that seems to serve no purpose whatsoever? In 15 years I don't remember ever pushing that button. I'm almost scared to touch it --Insanegrey, Lawrence, KS Guest contributor Una Persson replies: Although your mother told you that there are many things to avoid touching (like downed electric lines, scorpions, and the "naughty place"), don't be afraid to touch the Scroll Lock key. Nothing bad will happen - in fact, probably nothing at all will happen. Once upon a time, however, something did. The Scroll Lock key has appeared on the keyboards of IBM personal computers since the original 83-key PC/XT and the 84-key AT layouts, and remains on the 101-key and greater "enhanced" keyboards currently in use. The Scroll Lock key wasn't on the original Macintosh keyboards but appears on the Mac's "enhanced" keyboard. The main intent of the Scroll Lock key was to allow scrolling of screen text up, down and presumably sideways using the arrow keys in the days before large displays and graphical scroll bars. You can see where this might have been handy in the DOS era, when screen output typically was limited to 80 characters wide by 25 rows deep. For some types of programs, spreadsheets being the obvious example, it's still handy now. In Microsoft Excel, Scroll Lock allows you to scroll a spreadsheet with the arrow keys without moving the active cell pointer from the currently highlighted cell. In Quattro Pro, another spreadsheet program, Scroll Lock works in a similar manner, although in contrast to Excel it's not possible to scroll the active cell pointer completely off the screen. Other programs use Scroll Lock for special functions. It's said (although I haven't personally verified this) that the Linux operating system as well as some early mainframe and minicomputer terminals employed Scroll Lock to stop text from scrolling on your screen in command-line sessions - pausing the scrolling, in effect. The ancient DOS adventure game "Rogue" (one of my all-time favorites) used Scroll Lock to scroll your character's movement through the ASCII dungeons on the display. I'm told some computers in the late 1980s used the Scroll Lock key to halt the scrolling of the boot-up messages that appeared when you started the computer. This last use may be apocryphal, as I could find no examples of computers that displayed this behavior. The point is, Scroll Lock sometimes does something besides make that little light light up. Other odd keys worthy of note on your keyboard include the SysRq key (sometimes appearing as SysReq), which shares the same key as the "Print Screen" key. (Historical sidelight - SysRq was the "84th key" added when the 83-key PC/XT keyboard became the 84-key AT keyboard.) Unless programmed by a particular application, the SysRq key does nothing in most operating systems, including DOS, Windows, and OS/2. The SysRq key has different "hooks" into the system BIOS (basic input/output system, the interface between the software and the low-level functions of the computer) from the other keys on the keyboard. IBM evidently included this key to facilitate task switching in future operating systems - that is, to allow either switching from one task to another (as on a mainframe computer), or interrupting all tasks and returning control to the keyboard. Advanced MS-DOS Programming, second edition, Microsoft Press, states: A multitasking program manager would be expected to capture INT 15H so that it can be notified when the user strikes the SysReq key. In layman's terms that means, "You can make a multitasking program manager monitor a specific location in your computer's hardware so it can do something cool, such as letting the user switch tasks, when the SysReq key is pressed." As it turned out, the developers of Windows didn't use SysReq when implementing task switching. Some new keyboards no longer feature this key, and its days seem numbered. The Pause/Break key was used in the DOS command line environment for two different purposes. Pause cou
Scroll lock is not what "una" says it is. The function she describes wasn't used in that manner. The IBM PC used the standard Control-S and Control-Q to stop and start screen scrolling.
The Scroll Lock key was a vestige of the old IBM word processor systems. It was used to lock the cursor in place, and the up and down arrow keys scrolled the entire screen, leaving the cursor locked. It should have been called "cursor lock."
The article is riddled with errors. For example, una says the Macintosh extended keyboards have a scroll lock key. It does not.
for a cutting edge super user friendly OS: Make the Print Screen key actually work and PRINT THE FREAKIN' SCREEN!
The more you want, the less you have.
Dude, there should be a goatse/tubgirl like warning on that link. Now I am not hungry anymore. :-(
Okay what I wann is, what the hell is backslash for outside of computers? (\) ...
.. thanks microsoft! (I don't know if microsoft is responsible for that but I'll blame them anyway).
and doesn't it make you sick when people call the regular slash "backslash"
I thought the same thing...once...when I was about 5...and then I realized that that wasn't even remotely possible...expecially not now (O.K. I guess it is possible, but it's a whole lot easier to just print it on the box)
This space for rent...
ISTR that AltGraph+Help did something on older Sun machines, but I can't recall what.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
In fact the alt/option key is really just a replacement for the escape key, except one has to be dexterous enough to hold two keys down at once to use it.
And lets not even get started with delete/backspace key and the del key.
Just looking at my keyboard, which has as nearly as many function/command keys as character keys, I wonder if bloat stated with the keyboard and expanded into the software. I mean it looks cool and hi tech and all, but who needs to look hi tech in the 21st century?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
If you ever read any Michael Moorcock, it's even funnier ("Una Persson" is a contributor to the Straight Dope).
Dear Straight Dope:
Why does my computer keyboard have this "Scroll Lock" key that seems to serve no purpose whatsoever? In 15 years I don't remember ever pushing that button. I'm almost scared to touch it --Insanegrey, Lawrence, KS
Guest contributor Una Persson replies:
Although your mother told you that there are many things to avoid touching (like downed electric lines, scorpions, and the "naughty place"), don't be afraid to touch the Scroll Lock key. Nothing bad will happen - in fact, probably nothing at all will happen. Once upon a time, however, something did.
The Scroll Lock key has appeared on the keyboards of IBM personal computers since the original 83-key PC/XT and the 84-key AT layouts, and remains on the 101-key and greater "enhanced" keyboards currently in use. The Scroll Lock key wasn't on the original Macintosh keyboards but appears on the Mac's "enhanced" keyboard.
The main intent of the Scroll Lock key was to allow scrolling of screen text up, down and presumably sideways using the arrow keys in the days before large displays and graphical scroll bars. You can see where this might have been handy in the DOS era, when screen output typically was limited to 80 characters wide by 25 rows deep. For some types of programs, spreadsheets being the obvious example, it's still handy now. In Microsoft Excel, Scroll Lock allows you to scroll a spreadsheet with the arrow keys without moving the active cell pointer from the currently highlighted cell. In Quattro Pro, another spreadsheet program, Scroll Lock works in a similar manner, although in contrast to Excel it's not possible to scroll the active cell pointer completely off the screen.
Other programs use Scroll Lock for special functions. It's said (although I haven't personally verified this) that the Linux operating system as well as some early mainframe and minicomputer terminals employed Scroll Lock to stop text from scrolling on your screen in command-line sessions - pausing the scrolling, in effect. The ancient DOS adventure game "Rogue" (one of my all-time favorites) used Scroll Lock to scroll your character's movement through the ASCII dungeons on the display. I'm told some computers in the late 1980s used the Scroll Lock key to halt the scrolling of the boot-up messages that appeared when you started the computer. This last use may be apocryphal, as I could find no examples of computers that displayed this behavior. The point is, Scroll Lock sometimes does something besides make that little light light up.
Other odd keys worthy of note on your keyboard include the SysRq key (sometimes appearing as SysReq), which shares the same key as the "Print Screen" key. (Historical sidelight - SysRq was the "84th key" added when the 83-key PC/XT keyboard became the 84-key AT keyboard.) Unless programmed by a particular application, the SysRq key does nothing in most operating systems, including DOS, Windows, and OS/2. The SysRq key has different "hooks" into the system BIOS (basic input/output system, the interface between the software and the low-level functions of the computer) from the other keys on the keyboard. IBM evidently included this key to facilitate task switching in future operating systems - that is, to allow either switching from one task to another (as on a mainframe computer), or interrupting all tasks and returning control to the keyboard. Advanced MS-DOS Programming, second edition, Microsoft Press, states:
A multitasking program manager would be expected to capture INT 15H so that it can be notified when the user strikes the SysReq key.
In layman's terms that means, "You can make a multitasking program manager monitor a specific location in your computer's hardware so it can do something cool, such as letting the user switch tasks, when the SysReq key is pressed." As it turned out, the developers of Windows didn't use SysReq when implementing task switching. Some new keyboards no longer feature this key, and its days seem numbered.
The Pause/Break key was used in t
Um...for stopping things from scrolling by on the screen, like the name says? Like, say, the linux boot messages before your box kernel panics because, oops, you forgot the SCSI driver when you recompiled the kernel. Of course Windows users don't need that key, because all they get pretty 16-color clouds slowly swishing by occasionally having seizures, and if the system's busted, well, you're not cool enough to be told why...
Please help metamoderate.
"I've been wondering the same thing about my windows key."
It makes Windows bluescreen, STOP HITTING IT!!!
Alt-Gr, useful when that regular "Grrrrrrrr!" just isn't enough.
(Alt-Gr key example (in this case being illustrated as part of a key combo to produce the Euro symbol))
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I think the windows key is just alt-esc or control esc or some such thing.
Blatanly stolen from Simpsons episode 3f05.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
The registration key. All my software keeps asking me for it...
there's some good discussion going on in the forums: click me
My guess is that IBM wanted the new Personal Computer to have a layout more like the Selectric Typewriter than their EBCDIC-based 3270 series mainframe terminals, which used a whole 'nother series of weird protocol keys. The Control key was used mainly (only?) by ASCII systems at the time, and IBM systems consistently used EBCDIC. Probably the same goes for the Escape key. What bugs me about using emacs and vi on pc keyboards is they both make heavy use of control and esc. Nearly the most difficult keys for a right-handed touch-typist to reach. If I can manage to swap CapsLock with Ctrl, I'll use Ctrl-[ instead of esc in vi.
THe capslock key is wired on onall nigerian keyboards by law.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Funny? Lesbian porn is my way of life you insensitive clod!
I remember the computer lab we had at my elementary school in '89. If you pushed the ESC you were automatically logged out. No "Are you sure you want to log out?" just a sudden realization that those damn computers didn't work the way the rest of the world did, and that whatever you just did was no longer done.
This space for rent...
How did it come across? well, obviously from the typewritter, but who organized and why like that?
I still get a lot of use out of some of these keys. Crtl-Insert and Shift-Insert are still the best cross-OS way to cut and paste, working often even when Ctrl-C (remember what that used to do?) and Ctrl-V don't.
And as a graphic designer, Print Screen gets a lot of use. Alt-Print Screen copies a screenshot of just the active window to the clipboard. Useful for taking screenshots of websites, videos, etc.
Now, the one that really annoys me is this "Power" key that some PC keyboards have. I hit this once while working in Win2000 and the computer immediately shut off, without a prompt or anything. I lost 2 hours of work.
That Windows key is really a blemish.
Paul
I've always pondered what the grand purpose Scroll Lock had. Now I know, and realized I threw 8 years of my life away.
www.google.com
at my lab, we administer cisco routers using a console connection to a pc via hyperterminal. what you see in the screen is a scrolling-text, command prompt environment. sometimes, the keyboard gets bumped around and the scroll-lock button gets accidently pressed.
/.), when i'd hear him yell out:
my co-worker, in all the years that he's been working here, never seems to learn this.
i'd be sitting at my desk, trying to do more important stuff (like reading
"there's something wrong with this router! come check it out..."
me: "is the scroll-lock on?"
few seconds later...
"oh."
-- I hereby announce, on behalf of my great ancester Oog, a retroactive patent on THE WHEEL.
How would I do execution evaluation in a Unix shell?
/etc/password | cut -d: -f6`
for example:
SHELLVAR=`echo "you're absolutely insane!"`
or
SHELLVAR=`grep $YOURUSERACCOUNT
The second one is so I can get your user directory and delete what's in it, cause you're NUTS.
On old DOS systems (circa 3.0), SysRq could be used to reboot the system as alternative to ctrl-alt-del. It was alt-SysRq I believe. I remember leafing through the DOS manual for my old old XT, and seeing the description above. I didn't believe it, but I tried it and to my surprise it worked. When we upgraded to DOS 5.0 it no longer worked, but I had learned why it was called SysRq
I have one of these laying around. Those three keys are labelled F13-F15, but in smaller letters say "print screen" "scroll lock" and "pause" respectively
Now, it might be that some of the newer mac keyboards don't have scroll lock, but the original ADB extended keyboards did. For example, I have a USB spanish mac keyboard that doesn't have those extra labels.
see this link from a recent Slashdot article.
He ends up going over the edge eventually, but for a while, one poster was really handing this "contributor" her ass for the shitty article. Of course, it's followed by the self-love and clique-ishness so typical of that hole of a board. It's very unfortunate that more and more asinine board members are allowed to contribute to the main Straight Dope page. Anyone who spends enough time at that board, and displays the "right" personality flaws to be selected to write an article, shouldn't. The Internet would be better if their smug bitch writings were relegated to their aging dinosaur of a message board server.
Ha! /. effect fully engaged. That'll teach him to use 'Inbox.net' as his provider.
Lemme guess, unlimited bandwidth for $9.99/mo? At least it isn't the 'Would you like some Gator to go with your gossip column?' plan for $2.99/mo.
Mirror #1
Mirror #2
Mirror #3
Somebody mentioned KVM above; I have a keyboard in one of the cages at a co-lo (looks like an Aura but I'm not sure) that called the scroll lock "Scr Lock / KVM Switch". I thought that was neat.
Maybe TFA mentions that, but I can't RTFA because you selfish insensitive clods have /.'ed it.
All's true that is mistrusted
on a windows machine, hold the "windows logo key" and the Pause/Break key together! .. OMG! 2 of the most useless keys on the keyboard, together, they actually do.. well.. a useless shortcut
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
OK, it was added along with the Windows key. It's usually to the right of the right Win key and the left of the right Control. It looks like a dropdown menu. It mostly works like a right click in 'dows.
Why is it there? Was MS trying to cater to Mac users, accustomed to one mouse button? It makes no sense.
It's a number pad.... with diagonal arrows, which the normal arrow pad lacks. Try playing Civ without the number pad.
All's true that is mistrusted
What the heck is a Microsoft key doing on the keyboard?
this dates back to the teletype and is enshrined in the ascii alphabet as Xon and Xoff. Originally it was intended not as a scroll lock but as a way for a teletype or printer to not overflow its fixed hardware buffer. The communication baud rate could easily out pace the tele type printers print speed. when the hardware buffer was nearly full it would send an X-off (contol-s) to the sender to pause its communications. When the buffer was printed the teletype would send a X-on back to the sender to resume spewing.
There was no need for scoll locking functionality on a teletype printer since you could just hold up the paper and look at it back as many lines as you wanted.
but when dumb video terminals came along the terminals could print as fast as the data came in the X-on and X-off functions had little use as a communications protocol, but Now they were useful to humans as a scroll lock. they had at most 40 lines of text and once you scrolled off the top of the screen, you lost that line forever. There were no "windows" or "scroll bars". So you had your fingers poised over the contrl-s key to halt the text from flowing off the screen.
finally along came the PC and Microsoft messed with all the unix converions in their VMS/CPM ripoff called dos: so you could not be sure that control-S would actually work. In part this was because DOS was not really multitasking. programs could take over the OS and capture all the interupts and put hooks directly into the keyboard handler. Since there were no Menus and the "alt" key had not come into its standard defintion yet, the control keys were premium realestate for programs to hook functions into.
thus there was a need for another semaphore. So things like scroll lock and sysRequest, and print screen got added. So yes virgina you can blame MS for these keys as valuable male breasts or an appendix.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The 'Alt Graph' key on your Sun keyboard is *only* used in m0vieOS to toggle between console and 3d-fly-in-a-city-where-folder-are-like-buildings-w ith-a-tron-look. You have the wrong OS dude... don't worry about this key.
Go ahead and redundant me for it, but open up an excel spreadsheet and press scroll lock and move around with the arrow keys and then take it off and try again.
Well, the clipboard is a property of the environment, rather than the OS. But there's certainly at least one environment that allows this: GNU screen.
Screen has a concept of a buffer file that can be used to store or load the clipboard. The name of this file is defined in your screenrc, so it can vary from system to system, but it's often called /tmp/screen-xchg or (better for multi-user systems) ~/.screen_exchange. The keystroke ^A< reads this file and ^A> writes it; ^A> will also flash up a message telling you what the name of the file is (for example, Copybuffer written to "/tmp/screen-xchg" ).
So what you do is:
And there you have it.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
I love the layout of my Toshiba notebook, part of the keyboard looks like this:
[Enter ]
[shift][PgUp ]
[up ][PgDwn]
[spacebar][ins][del][alt][left][down][right]
It makes sooo much sense, all the juicy keys are right in one tight bunch.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
The kewl thing would be to find one of the keyboards that Compaq shipped with their systems...
The thing actually had an key...it was just an extra Enter key.
I did a search, and noone seems to be selling them anymore as this was back in the days of DOS...
Anyhow, it was specificaly to keep the cost of tech support calls down.
Well call me Catherine Cornelius and break out the psychotropic lesbian porn fiction...
Well it is true to the spirit of Moorcock. Just look at the cover art.
Ok, so it is a touch off-topic, but I was stunned to see a literary(sic) reference in a /. link
Q.
Insert Signature Here
I hope sometime soon we can all move to a more compact keyboard arrangement. I see laptops, and see the compact keyboard and I'm in envy. I hope this bulky set of push buttons we call a keyboard has seen the last of its days in the near future.
I hope alternative input method start to catch on, like the iGesture mouse pad or more optimal keyboards. If I could have a keyboard that was similar to a lego set, which would allow me to layout my keys in the exact order (and angle) I want, I would probably double my productivity.
Ergonomic keyboard seem to tell me "I should work this way", when I want to work another way. The time will come soon when a user finally can communicate with a computer in a more optimal way.
Nice. But I am quite attatched to my male breasts
Enclosing statements in backticks causes the string to be executed at the shell level and the resulsts stored ina string. You can do this in bash, Perl, PHP, and a myrid of other lanuages. eg type "echo `ls`" at the prompt. Then again I am sure most everyone knew this already
stupid tag filter...that should have been...
The thing actually had an [Any] key...it was just an extra Enter key.
Keys are easily removed. Just stick a pen under the offending key and lever it out. You will never accidently hit CAPS LOCK again. Or those weird Windows keys that are crowding out the space bar.
I have never bothered to remove the Scroll Lock, Pause, or useless number-pad keys (there's a Slash key there, I just noticed) because they are out of my hand's orbit.
When doing driver development on Win2k there's a great use for the scroll lock. When that driver locks the system you can press ctrl-scroll lock-scroll lock and blue screen the system on command.
/ Pa rameters
If you wanna try it:
make a REG_DWORD with value 1 called CrashOnCtrlScroll in the key
HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/i8042prt
After a reboot ctrl-scroll lock-scroll lock will blue screen it for you. Works on 2K or later. Not the nicest way to reboot a machine, but it means I don't have to grope for the little bitty reset button on my case.
I especially enjoyed how you mangle the language, grammar, and punctuation while trying to argue against twisting our language. Please crawl back into your troll-hole.
As a short list:
1. Repeated extensive capitalization as an indication of vocal volume.
2. Misspelling of "damnit"
3. Incomplete sentences.
4. Use of "Mod" as a verb. (the most similar to the slang you criticize so heavily)
Note that our language is completely jacked already-- to paraphrase your example:
It's BOXEN, goddamnit! OXEN! SHEEP! THIEVES! WOMEN! CHILDREN! MICE! BARRACKS! DICE! ALUMNI! VORTICES! AUTOMATA!
Look! It's a whole slew of plurals that don't follow any consistent rules! It's pretty "twisted" already. Besides, I like "boxen."
For me, the scroll lock key has been ripped out and placed where my left "Ctrl" key used to be.
Spare keys!
verilog (and possibly other HDLs) use both the backtick and tilde keys. not to mention backticks are used in unix shells.
the backtick is used for compiler directives: `define, `ifdef, etc. much like the pound for C/C++ preprocessor statements: #define, #ifdef, etc.
the tilde is used to invert bits in bitwise operations, either alone or with other bitwise operators.
conversly, I rarely use the Insert key
... what's so funny to have Left-Control at 3rd raw, while Right-Control at the buttom? What's so good of having such assymetric layout of Control keys when you have a perfect symmetric layout for Alt and Shift keys? And don't tell me any bullshit about any nostalgy.
Less is more !
Win+L will quick switch users and take you back to the sign in screen.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I still use scroll lock, you insensitive clod!
seriously, if you work with consoles on unix system, scroll lock was never outdated. (I'm inferring from linux and freebsd.)
In linux, scroll lock halts the scrolling of the screen. (like when 'ls' is printing stuff like mad, you can freeze the screen. more usefully, you can halt the output of gcc.)
Now, my memory of linux console mode is faint, because i switched to freebsd more than a year ago. It took me a moon or two to get used to freebsd console.
In freebsed console, scroll lock not only halts the screen output, it also allows you to scroll up and down. In freebsd console, normal shift-pgup and shift-pgdown of linux doesn't work. Instead, if you press scroll locks, you are in this scrolling mode and you can use your up-arrow, down-arrow, pgup, and pgdown to scroll. Then when you are down looking, you can press scroll lock again and business will go about as usual.
I fucking HATE Sun keyboards. I can never find the misplaced escape key (important for vi) and the bloody backspace key is too small. It's fine in your own home, but it's antisocial and irresponsible to use these things at work wherever other normal keyboard users are expected to have to use them from time to time.
To switch between computers for my one keyboard, mouse, monitor. KVM switches are sweet... scroll-lock, scroll-lock, up.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
I have a KVM switch ZONET KVM3004B :))
To switch between computers I use "Scroll Lock" + 1,2,3 or 4.
Nice !!!
|absolute values| and approximately equal to's =~
The "| clip" thing is not a WinXP thing. It's a 32-bit command line tool created by Dave Navarro.
cmdtools website "clip" is near the bottom of the page
clip.zip direct download
On old PC keyboards (84 key), the 'pause' function was control-scroll lock.
PCs never used ctrl-S and ctrl-Q. It was control-scroll lock to pause and any key to start again.
When the 101 key keyboard (separate cursor keys and numbers) came out it had a separate pause key.
I spent a few weeks in Germany this summer and had the "pleasure" of using a German style keyboard. Alt-Graph is used for a variety of characters on keys with 3 characters. Remember, Germans have a, o, and u with the umlaut above them (I dont have time to find the ascii). You have the key, the key+shift (like the ; : key) and the key+alt graph (or Alt-Gr as I saw it) Let me tell you, German keyboards are NUTS. I typed so many e-mails back home with sooo many typos. I don't have a keyboard like it here or I'd give some specific examples, but I DO know for sure that the 'Y' and 'Z' keys are switched as well, as Z occurs much much more frequently than a Y in german texts. "Hez Guzs, what have zou been up to for the last few dazs" is a pretty good example of what more than a few of My e-mails were like, especially after having a few liters of delicious Bier. Until then though, I had never even heard of Alt-gr before. Another weird aspect is that only the left Alt key was converted to Alt-Gr. The right Alt remained simply Alt.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
In theory, after running "apt-get install xclip" you can do things like
and the primary X selection will be loaded up with the output, all reading for middle-clicking. Likewise, you can sweep a bunch of text and use it with
Other options let you use other clipboards, etc.
In practice, you can't just apt-get it. You have to apt-get the source, apply the content negotiation patch, and run buildpackage yourself. Then it works perfectly. (I have no clue what content negotiation means, but apparently kde wants it.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
...i.e. the Bourne shell, from which Perl's use of backtick is directly taken.
Python uses backtick to cast a value into a string (print 'The value of x is ' + `x` + '.' means that all the arguments of the +s will be strings).
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
The SysReq (or "System Request") key is still heavily used in the as/400 world for job management on the system console. Using the SysReq key, you can send different signals to whatever current job was running
Think of it as a key dedicated to the unix 'kill' command.
~dlb
I didn't see anyone comment on this, but the SysRq hooks to the Linux kernel. It allows the user to send commands to the kernel like sync, reboot, etc.
is extremely knowledgeable and cosmopolitan. No urban legends, actual investigation, proper journalistic techniques. Believe me,
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
The interesting thing to me was that GPG was on his list of tools.
Never mind that one - I want to know what the completely blank key does.(upper left corner, between Help and F1). Auto-destruct? Auto-porn download? Coffee? Oral sex?
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
The ancient DOS adventure game "Rogue" (one of my all-time favorites) used Scroll Lock to scroll your character's movement through the ASCII dungeons.
-----------
I just love reading answers by "experts" who attribute anything "old" to DOS. I could have sworn that I played Rogue on old Unix Vaxen long before DOS was a twinkle in Bill Gates's eyes...
I imagine open files are tied to the "true" paths:w s/system 32/ntoskrnl.exe
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)/windo
etc, etc, etc...
The C: drive thingies are just useful for the Win32API, so opening new files off that drive won't work, and explorer will probably fail in mysterious ways later on, if the C: is mentioned anywhere in the registry where it might be used to dynamically load some view or file operation.
As you might expect, drives letters are just places where to start a mapping to a mounted filesystem (which is internally identified with a GUID, like everything else, the drive letter has no significance). Windows only needs C: to boot and load programs, but if you aren't opening files, you don't need it.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Have they lost all sense of finding things out?
/.
I remember when I wondered what the scroll lock key.
I thought, "hmm must lock some sort of scroll. well, text scrolls by, maybe I'll do a command that the out put will scroll a lot of text then press it.
Hey, what do you know."
But that is so 1980! now you just have to spend substantially more effort, and time, and ask
You know, I asked a guy a C++ question the other day, does he know it? no. and thats fine, but does he say he doesn't know it? ohh no. Instead he says, note the quotes,"Sure, I know that" then procedes to fire up Google to look it up. sheesh. I stood there patiently, but I should get a grant for surpressing the urge to Hit him with his keyboard, say "I can do that, dumb ass!" and then hit him with his keyboard.
Yes, I said it twice.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
To this page on E2 I wrote on The Pronunciation of Punctuation in Unix. Note that it is slanted toward my own experience in the scruz geek crowd.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
dvorak -vs- qwerty has a lot of misinformation floating around about it.. though you got it closer to right than most do.
Usually the story is told that the qwerty keyboard was designed to be as slow as possible, to prevent jams. This isn't true. As you said, it was designed to prevent jams by not putting frequently used characters next to each other, as would make sense to anyone who has ever used a manual or powered manual typewriter.
In a way, it WAS designed for speed.. if you are jamming, you aren't typing very fast, as you have to un-jam first.
Now, is dvorak faster and easier on the hands? Absolutely. Is it vastly superior? Not really.
Can anybody please tell me that the "blank" key next to the help button on a Sun keyboard is used for?
My first PC was a CompuAdd 286 12 Mhz Turbo. The "normal" speed of a PC was the speed of a 8086, 8 Mhz or less, I think (my dad had one of those). This was in the DOS 3 and 4 days.
Games were often designed to use the clock speed of the computer somehow in their timing. I remember a game called "Depth Charge" which ran nicely on the 8086 but was ridiculously fast on the 286. To slow it down, you would press a key sequence to get out of "turbo" mode, and then the game would play normally.
So the "turbo" key would deliberately slow down the computer's clock speed. Not what you would think, eh?
anyone who has ever used FreeBSD knows exactly what the scroll-lock key is for!!
do I smell smoke? oh no, here come the flames!
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
#!/bin/bash
vi $(which adduser)
for each in $(sort $(find -name "/tmp/$regex") | head -$(($some_math_expression)) );
do mail $each
#blah blah blah
done
That being said, I love the backtick. Especially useful for compose sequences (of course, Slashdot won't accept a demonstration).
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
don't you get it... god.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Isn't that what the compose key is for?
I thought Alt+Graph was a holdover from when you had two upper parts of the ASCII character set on some terminals (latin-1-type, and line drawing), and wanted to switch between them.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Oh c'mon you know you were thinking it....
The "| clip" thing is not a WinXP thing. It's a 32-bit command line tool created by Dave Navarro.
Woah, I never knew the guitarist for Red Hot Chilli Peppers was such a prolific programmer.
#!/
What are the proper names for the greatherthan and lessthan symbols on the keyboard? I have heard them called karat keys, html markers, greaterthan and lessthan etc... I know that mathematically they are the last (greatherthan and lessthan,) but is there a more proper name when referring to the keys on a computer keyboard?
Erutangis ym si siht.
Main Entry: semaphore
Pronunciation: 'se-m&-"fOr, -"for
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek sEma sign, signal + International Scientific Vocabulary -phore
Date: 1816
1 : an apparatus for visual signaling (as by the position of one or more movable arms)
2 : a system of visual signaling by two flags held one in each hand
Scroll Lock = "Hours of Fun" Key
Try this at home: Secretly enable scroll lock and wait for your wife (or anybody who is computer illeterate) to go on the computer to write an email (or whatever):
"G+/- Whats haening"
Translation: "OMG! What's happening?"
At least it works on Linux. And I'm pretty sure it doesn't work on Windows. Linux wins for the fun factor!
huh... just was playing around, and option + scroll lock (F14) opened the displays control panel. kinda nifty.
today is spelling optional day.
Obviously the scroll Lock key (next to the panic button key) is for console switching.
On Belkin KVMs:
[Scroll Lock]-[Scroll Lock]-UP
Slashdot just screwed it!
All the special characters magically disappeared...
Slashdot loses for the fun factor...
and rely on your own resourcefulness and intelligence to take care of YOURSELF... instead of pining for the rusty, tired Socialist machine that history has shown again and again to be a complete failure. Bread lines in the old Soviet Union - 9 months for an MRI in Canada - you wish this upon yourself?
This is how i got my porn fix pre-windows / X windows. SEA Image Viewer.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
it's because Sun Type 6 keyboards are made for both Suns and Linux boxes they ship, and on Linux boxes it's the escape key. The just change the key covers.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Since I can map a function to CTRL+ESC, but it is not activated by the windows key without special codes to interpret it. Ditto for the rest of these functions.
Windows key and CTRL+Esc etc do perform the same functions in windows, but one is not necessarily calling the other
I believe you can map for these keys in nix though?
That'd be much more useful.
In fact, the could just set it 'on' and remove the keycap, and leave the contact under plastic where it couldn't be reached.
No it's not, read the post before yours (and also RTFA)
9 287
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=81488&cid=715
And learn what a semaphor is
On the apple USB keyboards, F14 is not exactly the same as Scroll lock. I have a MiniView III KVM from IOGear. It's on screen display requires double tapping the scroll lock key. I can't get to the OSD with my apple keyboard because it doesn't have a true scroll lock key. Bummer. And yes, I know it can be switched to a double tap of cntrl...but when you play PC games...double tapping cntrl is a common occurance.
It's ctrl-esc, and the same thing happens in counterstrike. I want to rip that damn useless key off my keyboard and disable the switch. Did you ever find a less drastic way to deactivate it?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The "Alt Gr" key is used for us foreigners to reach seldomly used charatcers like @$ (Alt-Gr 2, 3 and 4 respectively), or {[]} (Alt-Gr 7890) or | (alt-GR `) or \ (alt-GR ). And more important, Alt-Gr e is the Euro character. You know, the european dollar, way stonger than the US dollar.
On the other hand, we get often used charatcers like aeoa as primary keys, and have access "# with Shift + 2, 3 and 4.
This is all based on a danish keyboard. Some people have grown beyond US-ASCII (7-bit crap)
Can anyone tell me what the heck that SysRq stands for under the Prt Scrn button ? I thought it stood for System Requirements, but when I press it, it doesn't tell me what processor and OS I'm going to need to play Doom 3...
You should find what you're looking for in one of the results from the following Google query: remap windows key
Will I retire or break 10K?
Personally, I'd ask this guy.
I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.
how many buttons are necessary?
I have a TURBO key on my keyboard where some people have a backslash (\) key to the right of the right shift key. My backslash key is to the left of the backspace key. The turbo key does not do anything at all as far as I can tell. It does not slow the computer to 4.77mhz mode, even when booted to dos 6.22 where things like control+alt+minus will tell the bios to disable turbo.
Morphing Software
1) Dos did not have windows to scroll. The use of Scroll lock in dos was as described, it had a different function than IBM used it for. 2) A semaphor is a signaling system. You might have in mind some jargon use of the term, but any singalling scheme including pressing keys on a keyboard can be called a semaphor in english.
Okay, that flame just didn't work. Your post really DID say "Hours of Fur" on my screen.
Looks like Firebird ate a piece of your 'n' for a minute there. Usually it just mysteriously italizes the odd line here and there. I wish they would fix that (6.1 and 7.0).
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
gives you - System Properties!
........
Windows 9x -> Windows XP
I think I've got that right
In Window Maker, 'wxcopy --help' and 'wxpaste --help' for help on using those.
I'm afraid I don't know about the others. Anyone? Anyone?
It's for locking the scroll... duh! ;-)
Seriously, it is rather handy when working in spreadsheets or large documents.
Its really the same key as Alt Gr on PC keyboards... seems PC makers are saving ink on the 3 last letters
But where is the any key?
But I can't find the /. key. My keyboard only has the
. and / keys, and I have to rearrange them myself. Quite frustrating.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Actually, pressing AltGR and 4 gets you a $ (dollar) symbol. To get the EUR symbol you have to press AltGr and E. At least under Windows anyway. I would demonstrate, but Slashdot filters the EUR symbol out :-(
I know most functions can be keyboard controlled in mostOSes, but I'd like a GUI layout that was exclusively keyboard [after all, they can make video games with only 9-13 usable buttons! why do I need 108+]...with the symbols|shortcuts|mappings clearly marked in the GUI/keyboard. Oh, I don't want MORE keys, and I'd prefer FEWER keys than we use now...ala Happy Hacker Kbd!
hey, it's a goal. But it's something to make Linux/OSS unique!
I have a stupid tablet PC with no keyboard.. you insensitive clod...
-- When did Ignorance Become a Point of View?
CLIP.EXE is a new command line util in Win Server 2003. MS added or improved 60 commands for Server 2003.
aQazaQa
At one point in the inspection, the technician had to monitor the machine from a boot-up state, and so he rebooted the machine. The only problem was, the machine didn't come back up. Instead, it hung early in the boot process, leaving the distinct impression on the observers that the technician had hosed up a perfectly good -- and very expensive -- minicomputer.
Apparently, the same impression was left on the technician, because he started sweating. A lot. He tried rebooting the machine again, obviously unsure of what the hell he had done to land in his present, miserable condition and just as obviously wanting desperately to be released from it. The machine hung up again. More sweat. Another attempt. Same thing: Hang. Then he opened the case and peered inside. He was clearly grasping at straws. The sweat started to bead on his forehead.
Eventually, after about fifteen minutes of increasingly distressing diagnostic procedures, consulting the LEDs, and hand wringing, he gave up: "You've got a bad motherboard. I'll have to call in for a swap." He half ran away from the uncomfortable scene to make his phone call.
While he was gone, the sysadmin busted out laughing. Then he pointed at the keyboard on the console VT320. The Scroll Lock LED was lit. The sysadmin said that the technician must have hit it earlier and never took it off before rebooting. When the kernel tried to send boot-up messages to the console, the console wouldn't accept them, and so the kernel blocked, waiting for the Scroll Lock to be released!
A few minutes later, the technician returned, looking only a bit less nervous. In his best it's-under-control voice: "Yeah, we'll have that new board out right away. No problem." The sysadmin's reply: "Great! I'm sure glad we have the preventative-maintenance contract, because I bet those boards are plenty expensive. I'd hate to pick up the tab for one of them." After a few precious moments of letting that thought sink in, the sysadmin "noticed" the scroll-lock situation: "Hey, isn't the scroll lock on? Let's just see what happens if I ..." He then tapped the keyboard.
And the Vax booted right up.
True.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
Wonder who the jiggy guy will be that reads this, then sends out email with an attachemnt that does this automatically for everybody. I know everybody with a winblows box would love to experience this new feature. Simple command box is all they need. Simple. Elegant.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
wow cool mang, leet hax
totally
The Windows key is just there becasue Macs have a key with an Apple on it. It's another Micosoft innovation.
And as others noticed already - that fraction of procent who remember old keyboards can remap Caps/Control at any time.
Less is more !
The Scroll Lock was also used by a DOS TSR known as ANSI. When loaded, it allowed scrolling of the entire screen history when the Scroll Lock was on. When you dir a huge folder, you could hit scroll lock and use the arrow keys to navigate the entire list of files. More useful than dir /p...
The Print Screen/SysRq key was used in Dos to send the current screen of text directly to lpt1: (your printer), hence the name "Print Screen". In Windows (all the way back to Windows 3.x), Print Screen executes a screen capture (without the mouse cursor) and puts it on the clipboard. Alt+PrintScreen copies just the current window.
In addition to what was said in the article about Pause/Break, pressing it _during_ a dir or other scrolling text operation will halt the screen. (This includes during booting before the OS loads.) Press any key to continue.
As for the `/~ key? Still haven't found a useful function for it other than typing a ` or a ~.
And the |? That one serves just about the same purpose to me as the "Context Menu" button on many newer keyboards, which is to say, none.
This message brought to you by Jack Schitt's Previously Shat Shit
Is that you probably don't want to see the stuff that would be collected by real lesbians. (If this is lesbian porn, why is there a man in the photo? Oh, I see that's a chick... I thought that was a dude!!)
-a
Just scanned across the keyboard of my S2450 Tosh Laptop - NO SCROLL LOCK KEY!!!
Still got Sys Req though, so only partly short-changed by the designers.
AT&ROFLMAO
Finnish keyboard is mostly fairly ordinary, but it has one odd key - the one left from 1, on the top left corner of the main letter section.
It produces (U+00A7, Section sign), or with shift, 1/2 (U+00BD, Vulgar fraction one half).
I don't know why it's that. It probably comes from the dark Middle Ages, when only lawyers could afford typewriters. (Nobody else uses such dark and evil symbols.)
I'm half hoping that someone comes up with keycaps that relabel this mysterious section sign key with word "CONSOLE", that's what it's used for in majority of games anyway... =)
It's not only used for special movieOS and it's not the same as the normal Alt. The Gr stand for Graphic and it's not used on normal US-keyboard layouts. But there are languages with more than the normal ABC alphabet. Try typing one of these on a US keyboard: ,+/-,,,,,C,B,a,a,a,a,c,e,e,e,,o,o,o,/,u,u,n
It's a kind of Shift key but instead of taking the upper char (shift) it takes the most right char displayed on the key.
So, yes some of our keys have 3 characters displayed on them. I think most americans will shiver when seeing my keyboard (belgian layout). ;-)
Who cares what it says on the keycaps? I sure don't.
Just whip out xkeycaps, spend a little time setting the keys to do what you want them to do and then never look down again!
Una rightly describes the "scroll lock" key as having "cursor lock" functionality
She doesnt attribute the "break" (stop/start screen scrolling) functionality to "scroll lock" at all.
I am surprised no one has mentioned it - no FPS gamers i guess - i bind scroll lock for useful yet non-common tasks - the suicide key - if your team is losing anyway before the end of the round - kill yourself rather give the opposition a frag. The suicide bind is more useful when you pull a pin from your grenade and rush into the enemy room and kill yourself before the nade explodes and you are shot dead [why? because kills by own nades result in deduction of points in some games and -1 frag].
Another useful bind would be to bind it to an admin function - key - finally, yep there are a 100+ keys on the keyboard but i can show you a function for each of those keys and still have more stuff to bind with with [ever play Tactical Ops?]. Yes, please don't remove the scrollLock key - in fact add, remove the Scroll Lock LED and put another key there. Thank you.
Open up Excel and change the current cell using the arrow keys. Now turn on Scroll-lock and change cell again.
The former changes cell without (unecessary) scrolling, the latter scrolls the window contents.
is for when you have three symbols on the keycap. For example, on my UK keyboard, there is the "4" key, with "4", "$" and (the euro symbol) - Euro is accessed using Alt-GR,4.
Under GNOME, Alt-GR can be used for inputting characters with accents. for example Alt-GR and ' followed by e produces e. Don't know about anything other environments, it might work there too.
Polish has a lot of "ogonkified" characters too, and uses Alt Gr for that. There was a time when the default layout (Win 3.11?) had a "typewriter" setting, just as weird as german layout (z-y, etc). The trick was, hardly any real polish keyboards could be bought, so if you didn't know the layout by heart... Hardly anyone used this, switching to the "Polish (programmers)" layout and now this is the standard.
;-)
Basically, Polish layout is the same as US, but with Alt Gr used for polish characters (9 lower case, 9 upper case).
US might not need AltGr, but the rest of the world does. Leave it alone.
Graph is short for "Graphic", since Alt Graph, well, gives you alternate graphic characters. Quite useful on non-US keyboards.
Some years ago in the DOS/Win3 age, I was watching my friend working at his PC.
His 2 cats were trying desperately to get his attention but he ignored them for the moment, too immersed in his work.
So, the cats decided to take revenge. One jumped onto his desk and approached the keyboard from the left, Then the other cat also jumped onto his desk and approached from the right. Next the cat on the left plonked down on the lower corner of the keyboard, hitting the Ctrl and Alt keys. My friend had little time to react, for the cat on the right took a few steps and firmly put its paw down on the numpad '.'/Del key. The PC promptly rebooted...
I remember we went reeling with laughter for some time after.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
Can we get rid of the Caps Lock key, please. It's utterly pointless, I never ever have a use for it, but I freQUENTLY ENGAGE IT ACCIDENTALLY.
Whoops, sorry.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Ithinkmyspacebarstoppedworking.
John Kerry is a Joke!
I did notice the example had to do with listing 20,000 Lesbian Porn pics but didn't see anything wrong with that until you pointed it out.
I just thought he should sort them into subdirectories like I do.
Sindri Traustason.
I know this from the reverse perspective: if I have to use a non-German keyboard, I frequently mix up z and y as well. Also, the US-keyboard layout is missing important keys as the o which I frequently use for typing my own name. But the US layout is more useful for coding, as important symbols like {[]}\`@ can be typed faster if you don't have to use the Alt Graph key.
For people who don't speak english, Alt Gr is pretty useful, as it lets you type accented characters. In EU countries, it is also used to let you type the Euro symbol - Alt-Gr+4 on UK and Irish Keyboards, Alt-Gr+E on most others.
It has nothing to do with clipboards, that's what.
To complicate things further, there are opening and closing single quotes at 145 and 146 in the *windows* character set. Just like the opening double quotes (windows: ALT-0147), these are not NOT in ISO-8859-1.
$ man xsel
Which ctrl-alt-del do you use?
One-handed R_CTRL+AltGr+Delete or L_CTRL+Alt+Del or maybe L_CTRL+Alt+NumDot ?
All of them are valid ctrl-alt-del - ALL of the three keys are doubled. In case any is broken so you could still reboot?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Someone had to say it!
Siggy Sig Sig? Where is the sig?
The "Crash" key used to take out 3dStudio, before 3dsmax was released. So artists would pry the evil thing out of its socket.
And it does what you expect it to do...
Not on my UK keyboard it doesn't. AltGr + 4 gives me the Euro, and AltGr + E gives me a grave accented e.
I so wish Slashdot didn't suck with non US-ASCII characters. The very worst part is that striping out non-US characters is a recent change! Thats right; it always used to work, now it doesn't.
What I never understood was the order of the numeric keys. Take your mobile phone out and look at its "key" layout. Its in ascending order right? Surely that makes more sense than descending like the PCs numeric keypad. Also note that on your mobile, the numeric pad and the top row, 0 comes after 9. As a geek, I'm pretty sure that should come before 1. Oh well...
Xon/Xoff is still in use today. It is still used as a software flow control for serial communications...
In any Windows environment (and I'm guessing GNU/Linux too - I'm at work. no boxes to check), go to the setting for your serial ports. Look under "Flow Control" and you'll see None, Hardware and Xon/Xoff.
- T
Now, if I could get over how old this article makes me feel... (How could someone not know what Scroll Lock is for!?!?)
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
still not always right though is it ! I mean depending on what it is you're doing pressing the shift key sometimes won't make any difference. Somebody should just sort it out once and for all and make a keyboard with a working "any" key mapped to "return" or some other configurable character. It'd make life so much easier .. dammit make it big and red while you're at it.
I use this program on the Mac:
Another Launcher for OSX
I also use a program called iPiano for Mac OSX to turn my keyboard's unused keys into a MIDI keyboard and sound bite launcher.
One can buy new key cap stickers or just go to an office store and get a sheet of clear translucent sticky paper and print their own keycaps.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
We installed that key so you could turn the Scroll Lock light ON and OFF, not so you could throw Scroll Lock raves.
This is why I use a British keyboard layout for almost everything, and setxkbmap fi or loadkeys fi-latin1 if I need to write in my native Finnish. Also, it's possible to get accents using special key combinations in X and console, so for short phrases I use those instead of the layout switch.
It also pisses me off that the Scandinavian keyboards have more changes (wrt US/UK) than what our alphabet requires. The punctuations are in truly horrible places for any coding, latex and shell work. I'm sure many would agree that the Gr refers not to graphical/greek characters, but to the frustration: GRRR! ;-)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I have noticed that ALT+0xxx give you the Windows character xxx, but alt+xxx gives you the approximate DOS character xxx. The box-drawing characters (e.g. used in WinDOS ports of NetHack) come out as +|-=_ or similar.
I really can't say I've missed the windows key, who needs a keyboard on an mp3/DVD player anyway?
Anyway my T40 came with 2 spare textured nipples and 2GB ram.
My mp3 player's better than yours so nah.
I suggest you read The Fable of the Keys, which does a rather nice job of debunking this popular myth.
Being in Sweden, I thought the Gr stood for "Grej" which means "thing" so Alt-Thing :)
..Michael Bolton said it best - "PC Load Letter??? What the f**k does THAT mean?" And I'm still wondering.
whatdoesthebiglongkeyatthebottomofmykeyboarddo?
Little Brother, watching the watchers
And I don't fail it!
If you see in news that today a guy went postal and murdered whole crew of an ISP - THAT WAS ME!
I use the ScrLk key to make my Belkin KVM switch change displays. If I hit it twice (it beeps) then hit the up/down key, it goes to the next/previous display. And I can even hit a number rather than an arrow key and it goes straight to the terminal plugged into the number key I hit. And if I hit the space bar after it beeps I am presented with an OSD for the KVM switch.
If I hit Ctrl then hit Esc (not to be confused with pressing them at the same time) on my Black Box KVM switch, I get an OSD that allows me to navigate to the terminal I want (very nice when you have 30 servers on KVMs).
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
Isn't it painfully ironic that the 'help' key is the most irritating key on the board when you're extending the right pinky?
Yeah, real programmers use vaxen.
"Be Happy or Die." -- AoN
Win+R is not the same as Ctrl+Escape, R.
The system used xon-xoff flow control, but one end (forget which one) would occasionally drop the xon, so everything ground to a halt.
The only solution was to disconnect the fiberoptoc cable, connect it to a converter connected to a VT220 terminal, type control-q, and put the cable back. The poor operator had to do this every few hours. Embarrasing!
The lesson? Assume a maleovelent adversary when designing communications protocols.
-- ac at work
At work, I frequently write quick "clipboard massager" perlscripts. Cut text in clipboard, run scrubber, paste out newly modified text without having to do any work. Saves tons of time wasted on possibly repetitious cut-and-paste operations.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I didn't know Enlightenment used the "Alt Graph" key.
Oh, wait, maybe you meant set up a macro so that Alt Graph runs Enlightenment.
Esc Meta Alt Ctrl Shift
OK, everyone's talking about the "props" and "alt graph" keys on the Sun keyboards. What I want to know is, what the HELL is the purpose of the " " key. No, I'm not talking about the space bar; I refer you to the UNLABELED KEY between the "Help" and "F1" keys on my Sun Type 5 keyboard. It's freaking me out!
-- Have you ever noticed that at trade shows, Microsoft is always the company that is handing out stress balls?
Scroll Lock? Who cares? I want to know why we still have NUM LOCK on all modern keyboards! I know that the numeric keypad also functioned as arrow keys, but that's why they added ARROW KEYS to the keyboard!
Nothing is more infuriating than typing in a monstrously long serial number, only to look up and find that the NUM LOCK wasn't engaged and you have to start over! GRRRRRRR!!!!!
Why's everyone downing on the Insert key? Go into overstrike mode once too often?
I use shift+del and shift+insert for cut/paste all the time. In fact, I do this so often that I don't "copy" anymore, I cut and paste, then I move and paste again. Sounds like a lot of work, but it works for me.
I'm really particular about my keyboard anyway. I demand that my enter key be confined to one row of keys, and that the pipe / backslash key be directly above it. I also demand a large backspace immediately above that. The tilde / backtick goes next to the number row under the escape key. Change the size or position of any of these and I get really irritated. You may wind up with a broken keyboard. I have seen keyboards that violate all of my rules - and not just on laptops!
Those of us with accent marks on our last names appreciate the Alt-Graph key.
No such appreciation extended to programmers who pretend there's nothing beyond the 128 characters of basic ASCII.
***Foucault is watching you..***
I use the Scroll Lock key to switch between systems on my Belkin OmniCube 4-Port monitor/keyboard/mouse switch. It's more convenient than reaching over to press a button on the box itself.
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
...and it has to be pushed while holding down ctrl-alt-shift-X-^-F13 (HA! found that!) to have your coffee done.
in other news, the Bush administration will probably make the Alt-Gr key illegal because terrorists can use that key to type the Euro symbol, thus making money.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
I want a control key here, here, and here. I can never find one when I'm mad. And I want them all to play "La Cucaracha."
Just a slip of the keyboard - the -en translates as -es in Nordic languages.
i.e, en box, tvo boxen
There doesn't seem to be any any key!
Phew. All this computer hacking is making me thirsty.
I think I'll order a Tab.
Oops! No time for that now, the computer's starting!
This function doesn't need to be on the scroll lock key, but if that key were removed, we composers would be locking and unlocking the auto-scroll with a key not labeled "ScrLk" (on my keyboard.) Oh, the humanity. I suppose that would be like hitting the "Start" button to stop the computer or pressing "Break-Windows" to get the control panel.
Anyhow, the scroll lock key is rather surprisingly used to lock the scroll.
i like how a seemingly innocuous /. post about the simplest topic can lead to nearly 1,000 posts of entertaining banter ... hardly any trolls or flame wars to be found!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
FYI, the windows key still crashes full screen games, especially MMORPGS that don't like you alt-tabbing out in case you're doing so to run some evil cheating software. I ripped mine out while playing DAoC a while back.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
OK, what's the flipped rotated L shaped character on the `/| key next to 1 on a UK keyboard for ?
Besides typing it on every line next to something that changes and then doing a global search and replace with it for a long useful string I can't see a use for it
Yes, there is no man page. The only reason I knew about the commands was from previous experience with NextStep. One command was called "paste" and the other was called "copy". Obviously, this caused a hassle when using the standard UNIX "paste" command, so I always aliased the pasteboard commands to something else. In OS X, Apple sanely renamed the commands with a distinct "pb" prefix. When I started working in OS X, I went looking for the old NextStep commands, and there they were, reincarnated. If I recall correctly, there were man pages for NextStep's "copy" and "paste". Lost in the OS X shuffle, I guess. If you say "pbpaste -help", it does give you a few options (e.g., if you copy formatted text in as RTF, you can force it back out as plain text). I use pbpaste all the time, by copying text in an editor and saying simplistic things like:
;-)
pbpaste | wc
pbpaste | sort
pbpaste | grep 'foo' | wc
But it is just as useful to feed to any complicated command you have cooked up, or into pbcopy.
Another useful NextStep legacy program along similar lines is "open". Feed it something from the command line (e.g., multiple files with a pattern: "open foo*.pdf"), and, if there is an associated application for the file type (or you specify it), it opens as if you had double-clicked it. "Open" does have a man page
And another good question to freeze the brain cells of the teenie-bopper know-it-alls at CompUSA bites the dust. Not a one of them ever knew what Sys RQ or Scroll Lock or Break were for. Those were almost as good as asking the red shirt in laptops if they had IRDA ports (didn't have a clue).
At this rate all the shopping fun is gonna be gone.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
"less" lets you sort upwards and downwards through your vast collection of lesbian porn, making sure you never use the same one to whack off with twice.
Aren't pagers grand?
AC
What I want to know is what happens when you type Local-Network-Rubout
An SCO lock is a legal mechanism initiated by a dying software company over a product they didn't develop, aimed at companies they can't compete with, causing bad feelings among customers they'll never see.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
It's here.
(Plug alert: I work for Platonix; this is a toy).
*Sigh* sometimes i feel so old... and i'm only 32. Well here it is my contribution to this nonsense
.
Ok...
1.- The SysReq is (like a lot of key, key-combinations) a direct access to the mother board circuit logic. or it was. how you could know? well if you have been programming a bios in a 8088 or 8086 (before the 286, 386, 486, pentium era) you would know. why is necesary? for the common people is useless but if you have a program rampant doing nasty things in your computer you can always do the SysReq and put an interruption to it (assembler int). Of course you can "capture it" and detect that the user want to do "someting" and then program a procedure that display a big happy face on screen (if you want to). So the simple answer is : "It was a necesary thing in the past, a direct access to stop execution and take control again"
2.- The PrtScr was a direct order too. it means "take what i have in screen and send it to the lpt1 port (printer). so i can read it later. i think it is stored in the keyboard circuit because the processor (8088) needs to be adressed and recive another interruption (int) to do this. but again. it was useful, an direct access
3.- ScrLck: the first explanation is correct. with this you can scroll up, down, left, right. but means nothing to the processor. i someting more like "software enabled function" BUT if you press the "a key" you get a binary number pass from the keyboard to the computer. if you press the "shift-a" you get another number ("A"), and if you put the CpsLk and then "a" you get the same number ("A") and with Ctrl-a is another number but with Alt-(any variant of "a") there is TWO numbers. first a 0 then the corresponding "a" (0 - a). Well is the same with the ScrLck it "changes" numbers assigned at "some" keys so you can detect the key pressed is diferent than the one without the ScrLck. maybe someting like (0 - left) changes to (1 - left)
4.- Pause: you can always test the pause key... do this... reboot your computer and when the memory numbers are counting press "pause" or when the BIOS resume is on display freeze your screen with the "pause" or when the POST are doing the disk check press "pause" and you would see the hard disk led lite on for ever and ever until you press any other key. again: direct, useful BUT if you let your computer display the "loading windows" screen/message you are grounded because the software (windows in this case) "disabled" the pause. as many other programs. again. you can "detect" that key and make it do something. disconnect, pause, happy face on screen . whatever.
5.-Break. Stop execution. another interruption (int) seems like Ctrl C but stronger : )
Another thing. those are SPECIAL keys. not ruled by the "shift is up" and "without shift is down" thing. usualy have a Ctrl-Key combination that makes another thing. keep printing whatever i write for example. ALL THIS IN OLD DOS, DIRECT PROCESSOR - KEYBOARD comunication. do not expect this to work on excel, windows, linux whatever. YOU CAN TRAP this keys and make them do whatever you want. make that clear
6.- Pipe Caracter (|) is NOT an "C" OR operator. in math you can write the OR like a vertical line. and this seems like a vertical line. so, i'm writing a compiler (call it C). i decide to use THIS as my OR operator (i could have use the %, &, # or another one the same way). whatever it is used for is not what it "means". what it means? i really don't know but. if the name is pipe or pipeline it makes sense that (as a plumber pipeline) is used to connect the FLOW of data from one program to another, weak example: "dir | more" in DOS, strong example any Unix structure with lots and lots of pipes, because unix is constructed that way BUT i remember that when creating Unix like a bunch of little programs that can do a lot of cool things when piped together they "select" the (|) caracter... so it was already in the keyboard... The most logical explanation i have for this is: if you want to draw a box with lines
It was done to my boss years ago (with e-mail)...every few minutes he'd answer his phone. What was really funny is that it went almost 30 minutes before he figured out we were screwing with him.
one more thing...set his/her balence to the speaker nearest the phone.
---
--- Just say no to negativity.
I thought Mr. Takamori had asked me what a "Crow Rock" was. I just shrugged.
You need imagination lessons. You can't imagine running the contents (not necessarily the output, but the contents) of a terminal program through arbitrary pipelines and storing the result back into the clipboard?
I'm sure you would pop up a window, paste the raw contents there into the pipeline, wait for stdout, and then just copy the resulting text again. A waste of a good terminal, and needless expenditure of human energy. And if the output doesn't fit on one terminal window, you have to hope you can highlight-drag and scroll the window at the same time; that's not possible on some terminal apps. And hope that you have enough scrollback to get it all.
Thanks, I'll just finish with "... | xclip" and let the computer do the gruntwork for me.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Belkin Omni view uses the scroll lock key to trigger the On Screen Display and targeted puter switch in their digital KVM switches.
Also; the game "A Tale in the Desert"
http://atitd.com
Scroll lock triggers a full graphics reload in game.
Combining the two can get a bit irritating though.
*"Cogito Ergo Liberalis"*
That's fine except for a couple of things:
1) It isn't scroll lock that is equivilient to Xoff. That's Pause.
2) The extra keys were not added in response to programs that took control of the keyboard. The extra keys were there from the very first IBM PC keyboard when it was expected that all IO would go through the BIOS.
When I read this article I remembered on a very interesting keyboard I found in an online shop once. I found this page again: www.linux-collection.de. Unfortunately this page is only in German but I guess you are able to see what it is about :)
SYS
frog23
Euro:
Although I have yet to see the AnyKey on a keyboard, I wish one of the keyboard manufactures would make a keyboard with the key.
Also one of my all time favorite keys I found on a electronic hardware device (not necessarily a computer) was the Don't Care key.
There was a blue cased device with a built in keyboard that had the Don't Care key.
I can't count as high as the number of times I wanted to use that key in real life.
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
Sheesh, all these posts about how it used to be useful, and yet people don't realize that it's still completely functional in a program used by millions every day: Excel.
Turn on scroll lock, and the arrow keys will scroll rather than select cells.
Wow, amazing how many hits you can get from slashdot, with a message this far down. I got like 5 times the normal amount of traffic on the Message Notifier website for a couple of days. Hopefully more people can get some use out of the plugin. :)
-- Josh
(and even if you dont use vim, having ESC handy is always a pleasure
It should have been called "cursor lock."
"Scroll Lock" makes sense to me:
Num Lock turns on the number mode of the numeric keypad.
Caps Lock turns on the capital mode of the alphabetic keys.
Scroll Lock turns on the scroll mode of the cursor keys.
Scroll Lock was used a lot in the early days of the PC. We used it quite a lot in our software packages. Yes, it was up to the ISV to implement, but basically meant you locked the scroll (DUH). Several editors we released had both read-only and edit modes, and working in character mode on the screen with only the keyboard to navigate, this made things easier (and quite good actually). If I am not incorrect, Kahn's SideKick used it too - for the same purpose.
Alt-Graph on a Sun workstation might try to do the same things as the comparative key on the PC: provide characters not found in the English language.
radsoft.net