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Insert is gone? I have it here... though I can't remember the last time I used it. I never found much reason to think "I want to overwrite existing text as I ty

Insert is gone? I have it here... though I can't remember the last time I used it. I never found much reason to think "I want to overwrite existing text as I type"

leephillips 19d ago
My keyboards have always had an INS key but they’ve never done anything and I’ve never bothered to map them to anything. I do sometimes want to overwrite, but that’s always in Vim where I can enter replace mode.
- CalRobert 19d ago
  I think I used it most in the odd game... I recall it may have activated stealth in Subspace (Continuum)
- SilasX 19d ago
  Hm I've seen keyboards where INS didn't appear to do anything, but that was because you had to press a different button to activate the set of keys that includes INS, and you might have been looking at a case of that.
- nosrepa 19d ago
  Shift+insert is paste in situations where you can't ctrl+v
pmontra 19d ago
Sometimes it is handy when doing something like ASCII art or drawing ASCII diagrams. Imagine editing a much more complex variant of this ---- | AB | ---- Finally, Shift-INS pastes from clipboard on Linux. A keypress saved compared to Control Shift V in a terminal. However they don't paste from the same clipboard: one is the primary selection (middle click) the other is the actual clipboard. However when I Shift INS into this textarea on HN I paste something else so I don't really know the rule and I stop here. I always use middle click, which is a hardware button below my touchpad and it is one more saved keypress.
layer8 19d ago
I use it quite regularly in text editors, in particular when authoring something with two-dimensional layout (simple diagrams, folder-like line trees), and occasionally for the CUA Cut & Paste shortcuts (e.g. in terminal emulators). There’s also a number of applications where it has a useful binding, such as marking a task as (un)complete in Outlook, or (un)flagging an email.

Insert is gone? I have it here... though I can't remember the last time I used it. I never found much reason to think "I want to overwrite existing text as I type"

leephillips 19d ago

My keyboards have always had an INS key but they’ve never done anything and I’ve never bothered to map them to anything. I do sometimes want to overwrite, but that’s always in Vim where I can enter replace mode.

CalRobert 19d ago
I think I used it most in the odd game... I recall it may have activated stealth in Subspace (Continuum)
SilasX 19d ago
Hm I've seen keyboards where INS didn't appear to do anything, but that was because you had to press a different button to activate the set of keys that includes INS, and you might have been looking at a case of that.
nosrepa 19d ago
Shift+insert is paste in situations where you can't ctrl+v

pmontra 19d ago

Sometimes it is handy when doing something like ASCII art or drawing ASCII diagrams. Imagine editing a much more complex variant of this ---- | AB | ---- Finally, Shift-INS pastes from clipboard on Linux. A keypress saved compared to Control Shift V in a terminal. However they don't paste from the same clipboard: one is the primary selection (middle click) the other is the actual clipboard. However when I Shift INS into this textarea on HN I paste something else so I don't really know the rule and I stop here. I always use middle click, which is a hardware button below my touchpad and it is one more saved keypress.

layer8 19d ago

I use it quite regularly in text editors, in particular when authoring something with two-dimensional layout (simple diagrams, folder-like line trees), and occasionally for the CUA Cut & Paste shortcuts (e.g. in terminal emulators). There’s also a number of applications where it has a useful binding, such as marking a task as (un)complete in Outlook, or (un)flagging an email.