my brother works at seek and he and the IT dudes were looking at a regular keyboard and wondering why there is scrolll lock. apart from screwing around excel then why is it there?
I've always wondered why it is there.
to paraphrase Edwin Starr "scroll lock, hhhuuuu, what is it good for? absolutely nothing, what? say it again, hhhhuuu"
so what are you using the old ctrl for?
also see below
It's still Ctrl also (you can have more than one) in case I revert to bad habits. The PC keyboard layout followed the IBM Selectric keyboard, which is for typists, not programmers. People who had workstations before PCs will remember that Ctrl was to the left of A, a better place for it.
Not true. It was used when a large amount of text was scrolling down the screen. To view a part of the text you would hit the scroll lock key. To move to the next page you would hit space. This was handy when checking boot sequences or program code or when listing the contents of large directories.
Oops, my bad, I misread the original question as shift lock. That's another seldom used key which I have remapped.
SELDOM USED - ARE YOU KIDDING?
CAPS LOCK IS COMMONLY USED ON INTERNET FORUMS.
Works great in DOS, which im sure it was initially intended for
Scroll lock is still useful for navigating Excel spreadsheets.
Scroll Lock is from the old days when there was no graphical interface and mice.
Basicallly it is used in text based input where you could only hit one key at a time. Move cursor over start point in text click Scroll Lock to start highlighted text move cursor hit scroll lock again then you can edit the selected text.
If you have ever used Unix OS VI text editer you will know what I mean by one click controls.
It has floated around in the years to follow on the PC keyboards due to the dominance of MS and its archaic programmers to always having to build their OS with an underlying DOS subsystem. Scroll lock is rarely used now as you can now run DOS in a windows and have mouse and windows functionality for selecting text.
Pretty much the key is useless but it is still there as a modifier if you program for it like in games, excel etc.
It's really annoying when you accidentally hit it in Excel and then spend 15 minutes trying to figure out why your spreadsheet's not moving like it should.
err… that's what it does… you locked the scrolling. :P
there is a purpose for those keys… though i bet no one knows what SysRq is for until they start googling it. :P
Personally I find scroll lock very useful even in GUI applications. I use the keyboard rather than mouse wherever possible and it saves time. I hate developers who do not support it. No excuse.
some laptops use scroll lock to lock the function key, so you don't have to keep pressing function.
It's an anachronism from the days when computer keyboards imitated typewriters and sometimes you had to go into CAPS for a lot of typing. I'm sure there is a way in any OS to remap it to something more useful. I've remapped mine to Ctrl.