9 ms·

After 20 years of using keyboards, I have, thanks to this comment, discovered the "Home" button.

by retube 6y ago

cool-RR 6y ago
This amazes me. Thanks for your honesty, there are probably millions of people who are in the same position. While you're looking down, wouldn't hurt to look at all the different keys and give them a try.
- retube 6y ago
  Thanks. And now I have discovered the "End" button!
- vimslayer 6y ago
  * tries a "Wi-Fi toggle" button, looses internet and is unable to google for help
  - o-__-o 6y ago
    We laugh, but I had to troubleshoot my dads laptop once upon a time and had to ask him what lights are on on his keyboard. “The airplane light is on”
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  > wouldn't hurt to look at all the different keys and give them a try. TIL Enter key toggles comment collapsing.
  - graedus 6y ago
    More generally Enter acts as a left-click on whatever element has focus in the browser. If you press tab, you cycle the focus to the next link/input/button/whatever. Shift+tab cycles through them in reverse order. If a normal hyperlink has focus, you can do things like CMD+Enter (MacOS) or CTRL+Enter (Windows) to open it in a new tab, etc
- zrobotics 6y ago
  I had a family member call me in a legitimate panic because her "Gmail got hacked, all of a sudden the whole screen changed and there a bunch of weird code all over the screen!" Turns out the f12 key was the culprit; took me longer than it should have to realize she was describing the Firefox developer console.
- nkrisc 6y ago
  The first thing I do with any new device is push all the buttons to see what they do. Push, push-and-hold, and push multiple times quickly.
Jimmc414 6y ago
Since your brain is already in keyboard learning mode, give Shift + Home and Ctrl + Shift + Home a try. It works wonders when selecting text for cutting and pasting. The same combos work with End as well as the arrow keys.
derefr 6y ago
For Apple 101-key keyboard users, who don’t have a “Home” key: try Cmd+Up (and Cmd+Down.) Bonus: also try Ctrl+E (and Ctrl+A) in text fields, or on the command-line. (Both of these carry over to iOS, if you’re curious. I just tested them with the iPad keyboard-folio thing.)
- CGamesPlay 6y ago
  The actual keys are Fn+Left and Fn+End for Home and End (Fn+Up is PageUp, etc). These will also work in Terminal apps or other places that don’t have specific Cmd-Up / Down bindings.
  - derefr 6y ago
    True; but Cmd+Up and Cmd+Down are slightly more universal across the “Apple ecosystem”, given that iOS-specific keyboards don’t have Fn keys, but do support those shortcuts. :) Interesting aside: the “Globe” key on an iPad keyboard-folio (the one that opens the IME chooser) has some but not all of the properties of an Fn key. Globe+Left and Globe+Right work as PgUp/PgDn, but Globe+Up and Globe+Down do not work as Home/End. (Or maybe they do, but Home/End just aren’t bound in any app I’ve tested? I don’t want to write+deploy an iOS keysym tester just to find this out...)
  - bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
    For the record, Cmd-up/down navigates between prompts in Terminal.app
- hibbelig 6y ago
  cmd-up/cmd-down go to top/bottom of the document. cmd-left/cmd-right go to beginning/end of the line. It seems Word for Mac supports cmd-left/right but not cmd-up/down. Word also supports fn-left (home) and fn-right (end), and fn-opt-left does like ctrl+home on Windows.
- racl101 6y ago
  Are Ctrl+e and ctrl+a Emacs conventions?
umvi 6y ago
Home and End are the amazing in VSCode for doing bulk line edits in conjunction with multi cursor.
cpfohl 6y ago
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ Just to pile on with fun new keyboard tricks! Caveat: "linux" here is largely specific to the Desktop environments I've worked with. 'Good terminals' refers to termianls that support emacs keybindings by default, which is the mac os terminal, and most linux bash/zsh terminals at least. I know Cygwin and Conemu respect this under normal usage too. ## Start and end of line: - Mac: CMD + left, CMD + right - Linux/PC: Home and End Buttons - Linux/Mac/Good Terminals: ctrl+a ctrl+e ## "Word-wise" movement: - Mac: option+left, option+right - Linux/PC: alt+left, alt+right - Good Terminals: alt+b, alt+f (mnemonic: 'back' and 'forward') The 'shift' key can be added to any of the above to select whole words or lines, or parts of lines at a time. Combined with multiple insertion points you've got superpowers.
LeifCarrotson 6y ago
Other keys that may be non-obvious: - Insert toggles between shifting characters after the cursor to the right and deleting the character to the right of the cursor, replacing it with the new character you typed, but not replacing a newline character. While eg. Caps Lock is global, Insert mode is local to the text input that currently has focus - tab or mouse over to a new window and you've lost Insert mode, tab back to the one where you previously set it and you're back to Insert mode. - Delete is like Backspace, but deletes stuff to the right of the cursor. - Home, as you discovered, moves browsers to the top of the page. When composing text, it moves the cursor to the start of the line (and vice versa with "End"), CTRL+Home moves to the start of the text entry box. - Page Up and Page Down shift the cursor by screenfulls of text, typically leaving a couple lines at the top and bottom for context. Note to web developers who are unfamiliar with keyboards: Make sure your fixed/sticky header/footer banners don't hide content when using "Page Up" and "Page Down". Also of note, CTRL+Page Up/Down and CTRL+Tab/CTRL+Shift+Tab shift the window or tab focus within an application, for example to go to the next tab in Chrome or the next file in your IDE. - Print Screen creates a screenshot. Depending on your setup, this may either go to your Pictures folder, or may go to the clipboard (open an image editor eg. Win+R, mspaint, and CTRL+V to paste). It shares a key with SysRq, which can be accessed with Alt+SysRq+(magic letter), and used to recover from various crash conditions - be careful, if you start hitting letters at random, you'll invoke the bad kind of magic that will shut down your computer. - Scroll lock was used to stop auto-scrolling an input buffer that was running too fast. Largely neutered in modern OSes, it's still useful in the BIOS when all the hardware initialization messages are scrolling by too fast to read. Sometimes it's also used to toggle keyboard backlighting because it had an LED attached and doesn't have a real function anymore, but depending on the manner in which your OS/hardware neuters this key your keyboard backlighting may not work. - Pause/Break kills a process like CTRL+C, but sometimes has different specific modes of operation in various debuggers. Access the "break" alternate function with CTRL+Pause. - Super/Windows key opens the Start menu or search tool. On Macs, it's the Command key and used for lots of keyboard shortcuts. Hyper useful for window management, Super+arrow keys move screens to the left or right half of the monitor, maximize, resize, or minimize them, and Shift+Super+arrow moves them between multiple monitors. - Num lock toggles between entering numbers with the 10-key section of the keyboard and that section's alternate navigation functions, where 7 is home, 1 is end, 9 is page up, 3 is page down, and 4/8/6/2 are left/up/right/down respectively. Not really important if you've got an inverted-T arrow cluster and Super useful on some dumb 17" laptops that cram in a 10-key section but relegate all these normal navigation keys to arcane random Function invocations on tiny distant buttons crammed into the top of the keyboard if they're present at all. Uniquely, Num Lock is typically remembered across reboots.
shanecp 6y ago
6 years in university + 10 years of work experience. Today I know what Home/End keys do, because of a random comment on the internet.

After 20 years of using keyboards, I have, thanks to this comment, discovered the "Home" button.

by retube 6y ago

After 20 years of using keyboards, I have, thanks to this comment, discovered the "Home" button.

This amazes me. Thanks for your honesty, there are probably millions of people who are in the same position. While you're looking down, wouldn't hurt to look at all the different keys and give them a try.

retube 6y ago
Thanks. And now I have discovered the "End" button!
vimslayer 6y ago
* tries a "Wi-Fi toggle" button, looses internet and is unable to google for help
- o-__-o 6y ago
  We laugh, but I had to troubleshoot my dads laptop once upon a time and had to ask him what lights are on on his keyboard. “The airplane light is on”
KineticLensman 6y ago
> wouldn't hurt to look at all the different keys and give them a try. TIL Enter key toggles comment collapsing.
- graedus 6y ago
  More generally Enter acts as a left-click on whatever element has focus in the browser. If you press tab, you cycle the focus to the next link/input/button/whatever. Shift+tab cycles through them in reverse order. If a normal hyperlink has focus, you can do things like CMD+Enter (MacOS) or CTRL+Enter (Windows) to open it in a new tab, etc
zrobotics 6y ago
I had a family member call me in a legitimate panic because her "Gmail got hacked, all of a sudden the whole screen changed and there a bunch of weird code all over the screen!" Turns out the f12 key was the culprit; took me longer than it should have to realize she was describing the Firefox developer console.
nkrisc 6y ago
The first thing I do with any new device is push all the buttons to see what they do. Push, push-and-hold, and push multiple times quickly.

Jimmc414 6y ago

Since your brain is already in keyboard learning mode, give Shift + Home and Ctrl + Shift + Home a try. It works wonders when selecting text for cutting and pasting. The same combos work with End as well as the arrow keys.

derefr 6y ago

For Apple 101-key keyboard users, who don’t have a “Home” key: try Cmd+Up (and Cmd+Down.) Bonus: also try Ctrl+E (and Ctrl+A) in text fields, or on the command-line. (Both of these carry over to iOS, if you’re curious. I just tested them with the iPad keyboard-folio thing.)

CGamesPlay 6y ago
The actual keys are Fn+Left and Fn+End for Home and End (Fn+Up is PageUp, etc). These will also work in Terminal apps or other places that don’t have specific Cmd-Up / Down bindings.
- derefr 6y ago
  True; but Cmd+Up and Cmd+Down are slightly more universal across the “Apple ecosystem”, given that iOS-specific keyboards don’t have Fn keys, but do support those shortcuts. :) Interesting aside: the “Globe” key on an iPad keyboard-folio (the one that opens the IME chooser) has some but not all of the properties of an Fn key. Globe+Left and Globe+Right work as PgUp/PgDn, but Globe+Up and Globe+Down do not work as Home/End. (Or maybe they do, but Home/End just aren’t bound in any app I’ve tested? I don’t want to write+deploy an iOS keysym tester just to find this out...)
- bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
  For the record, Cmd-up/down navigates between prompts in Terminal.app
hibbelig 6y ago
cmd-up/cmd-down go to top/bottom of the document. cmd-left/cmd-right go to beginning/end of the line. It seems Word for Mac supports cmd-left/right but not cmd-up/down. Word also supports fn-left (home) and fn-right (end), and fn-opt-left does like ctrl+home on Windows.
racl101 6y ago
Are Ctrl+e and ctrl+a Emacs conventions?

umvi 6y ago

Home and End are the amazing in VSCode for doing bulk line edits in conjunction with multi cursor.

cpfohl 6y ago

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ Just to pile on with fun new keyboard tricks! Caveat: "linux" here is largely specific to the Desktop environments I've worked with. 'Good terminals' refers to termianls that support emacs keybindings by default, which is the mac os terminal, and most linux bash/zsh terminals at least. I know Cygwin and Conemu respect this under normal usage too. ## Start and end of line: - Mac: CMD + left, CMD + right - Linux/PC: Home and End Buttons - Linux/Mac/Good Terminals: ctrl+a ctrl+e ## "Word-wise" movement: - Mac: option+left, option+right - Linux/PC: alt+left, alt+right - Good Terminals: alt+b, alt+f (mnemonic: 'back' and 'forward') The 'shift' key can be added to any of the above to select whole words or lines, or parts of lines at a time. Combined with multiple insertion points you've got superpowers.

LeifCarrotson 6y ago

Other keys that may be non-obvious: - Insert toggles between shifting characters after the cursor to the right and deleting the character to the right of the cursor, replacing it with the new character you typed, but not replacing a newline character. While eg. Caps Lock is global, Insert mode is local to the text input that currently has focus - tab or mouse over to a new window and you've lost Insert mode, tab back to the one where you previously set it and you're back to Insert mode. - Delete is like Backspace, but deletes stuff to the right of the cursor. - Home, as you discovered, moves browsers to the top of the page. When composing text, it moves the cursor to the start of the line (and vice versa with "End"), CTRL+Home moves to the start of the text entry box. - Page Up and Page Down shift the cursor by screenfulls of text, typically leaving a couple lines at the top and bottom for context. Note to web developers who are unfamiliar with keyboards: Make sure your fixed/sticky header/footer banners don't hide content when using "Page Up" and "Page Down". Also of note, CTRL+Page Up/Down and CTRL+Tab/CTRL+Shift+Tab shift the window or tab focus within an application, for example to go to the next tab in Chrome or the next file in your IDE. - Print Screen creates a screenshot. Depending on your setup, this may either go to your Pictures folder, or may go to the clipboard (open an image editor eg. Win+R, mspaint, and CTRL+V to paste). It shares a key with SysRq, which can be accessed with Alt+SysRq+(magic letter), and used to recover from various crash conditions - be careful, if you start hitting letters at random, you'll invoke the bad kind of magic that will shut down your computer. - Scroll lock was used to stop auto-scrolling an input buffer that was running too fast. Largely neutered in modern OSes, it's still useful in the BIOS when all the hardware initialization messages are scrolling by too fast to read. Sometimes it's also used to toggle keyboard backlighting because it had an LED attached and doesn't have a real function anymore, but depending on the manner in which your OS/hardware neuters this key your keyboard backlighting may not work. - Pause/Break kills a process like CTRL+C, but sometimes has different specific modes of operation in various debuggers. Access the "break" alternate function with CTRL+Pause. - Super/Windows key opens the Start menu or search tool. On Macs, it's the Command key and used for lots of keyboard shortcuts. Hyper useful for window management, Super+arrow keys move screens to the left or right half of the monitor, maximize, resize, or minimize them, and Shift+Super+arrow moves them between multiple monitors. - Num lock toggles between entering numbers with the 10-key section of the keyboard and that section's alternate navigation functions, where 7 is home, 1 is end, 9 is page up, 3 is page down, and 4/8/6/2 are left/up/right/down respectively. Not really important if you've got an inverted-T arrow cluster and Super useful on some dumb 17" laptops that cram in a 10-key section but relegate all these normal navigation keys to arcane random Function invocations on tiny distant buttons crammed into the top of the keyboard if they're present at all. Uniquely, Num Lock is typically remembered across reboots.

shanecp 6y ago

6 years in university + 10 years of work experience. Today I know what Home/End keys do, because of a random comment on the internet.