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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.
I've been wondering the same thing about my windows key.
<> !*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<> ~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.
Very handy key.. I press it twice and my Linksys KVM switches to the other system. Does it do something else?
Many people think that scroll lock is now useless, except in Microsoft Excel, but it does have a much more useful purpose, at least in Linux and perhaps BSD.
Whenever my lab partner does something good, I hit the props key. Sun machines are cool like that.
Something has to turn the Scroll Lock light on and off.
The Danish keymap is the same on all PC's (and Sun Boxen as well), and we need Alt Graph to access the following characters:
\@${[]}|~?
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.
WHATISTHISCAPSLOCKKEYFOR?
It's for annoying the crap out of email recipients and newsgroup readers - of course.
Damn Slashdot, it filtered the accents on "tres" and "frequemment".
Marcelo Vanzin
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.
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
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
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...
THe capslock key is wired on onall nigerian keyboards by law.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I think the windows key is just alt-esc or control esc or some such thing.
You're right. The "Windows Key" (AKA Start Button) is CTRL+ESC. The "right-click" is SHIFT+F10. The "Task Manager" is CTRL+SHIFT+ESC. The "Boot a Real OS" is CTRL+ALT+DEL.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Look no further, Compaq has the answer.
The first time I read that, I thought that by 'our languages' you meant bash. Time to go outside.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Not sure if that is was a Win95 bug, a Duke bug or what. However, clearly it is possible to detect the difference between the two keys.
Hmmm, that might have been Ctl-Esc, but I remember the bug in Duke was like that.
Kirby
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.
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
What's next to your home key?
...
My car key, my office key, my desk key,
If I recall correctly, back in the days of openlook, the props key was used to bring up the properties menu for a window. That's as much as I can remember.
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.
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.
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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.