I see no use for the numlock key, I'd rather just have the numpad on the whole time. Are there actually cases where it is useful or people who for some reason prefer their numpad turned off?
It depends on if you are a heavy mouse user or a heavy keyboard user and you are using a laptop with a restricted keyboard. Personally to scroll a document I prefer the buttons page up/down home/end. Often I also use those buttons to select big parts of a file that I want to copy. E. g. Shift+Ctrl+End form me is a useful combination. On the other hand I rarely use the numeric pad for numbers, but I also feel more comfortable typing with the left hand, I guess that a lot more people heavy keyboard user would prefer the numeric pad.
Yes the mouse is changing the habits for a lot of people, but the numlock may still be useful for some.
I don’t think I’ve ever used numlock for anything other than “oh shit, I must have accidentally hit it when I was entering numbers via 10 key so I need to turn it off.
I think it is still is useful, as some software still hasn’t figured out how to turn on numlock automatically, and for a few applications number pad scrolling can be better than the arrow keys, but it is probably less useful than the scroll lock key at this point.
I have a smaller keyboard that doesn’t have dedicated arrow keys, or any of the home, page up, etc. They’re all on the numpad, so numlock for me is very useful.
For a full size, 104-key PC keyboard, everything that is mapped to the numpad is also somewhere else, and the keys are spaced out enough that you'd almost never need to turn off the numpad, so the key is just there for oddball legacy apps that do weird stuff. It was more important before IBM released the fully "modern" 101-key Model M.
For laptop keyboards and other reduced format keyboards that still include all or part of a numpad, it can still be useful. I actually use autohotkeys instead, but one of my budget mechanical keyboards only has the arrow nav keys and the rest are accessed by turning off NumLock.
Right, but do you ever turn num lock off? I think the OP was trying to say it should just be stuck on because why would you use those arrow, home/end/pg up/etc buttons that kick in if num lock is off?
Scroll Lock is the one that comes to mind as a safe removal.
However, for me, the real useless AND inconvenient piece of shit I wish I could rebind as I want that space for something better is Caps Lock. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy to do.
Use autohotkey! I have a very simple solution for this, where the caps lock key is mapped either as a backspace key, or it minimizes the current window.
You should look into Kanata. It lets you remap the whole keyboard, same idea as QMK, except it’s running on your computer instead of the keyboard itself.
It can be a bit tricky to set up if you’re not used to that sort of thing, but I managed to figure it out so if you have any questions feel free to ask.
There's an old game I grew up with called Castle of the Winds. You could also move using some other keys or the mouse, but for me my favorite way by far was using the numpad with numlock turned off.
I also used to use the numpad while playing Half-Life, as the person who introduced me to that game swore by remapping all the keys to the numpad.
Old games are pretty much the only use Ive ever seen. The keypad can be used as arrow keys, but with diagonal options and the ability to easily switch over to numbers. Nethack, for instance, is extra challenging without a proper numberpad.
Yes. On my keyboard there's no separate "end" key, it's part of 3 on the numpad, that key is very useful when using the terminal, because you don't need to wait for 5 years for the cursor to make it to the end of your command.
If you have keyboard software, you might be able to use that. I use autohotkey for reassigning keys. The script would be:
SetNumLockState, AlwaysOn
NumLock::End
For windows,
Just put it in a txt file after installing AHK and use .ahk at the end of the file name. There's a way to make it the default script, but I think but I use just task scheduler to make it start on boot/login.
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