Things you hate about the QWERTY keyboard

[Machine_Elf]

@Crafter_Man

At least once a day - no, let’s make that six times a day - I will accidently hit the Caps Lock key when my intention was to hit the a key. I continue typing, look up, and see THE REST OF MY SENTENCE IN UPPER CASE. Since it’s not used much, why the hell can’t they put the Caps Lock key in some far off corner?

I have a Logitech K860 keyboard, and there’s a utility program with it that allows the user to disable:

• Num lock
• Caps lock
• Scroll lock
• insert
• Windows/Start key

You might consider getting one of these.

[needscoffee]

@jnglmassiv

There’s a Windows setting to play a sound when you hit Caps Lock. In Win10, look under Keyboard > Toggle Keys.

Thanks! It worked!

[pjd]

I checked … and there is a scroll lock key on my lap top.
It doesn’t seem to do anything !
How is it supposed to manifest itself ?

[Machine_Elf]

Try scrolling inside a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet. With scroll lock on, the cursor will stay where it is and the whole document will scroll. With scroll lock off, the cursor will move to the top/bottom of the window, but the document won’t scroll until the cursor gets there.

[Seanette]

@AHunter3

I have a complaint about the Windows operating system and it’s ludicrously anachronistic support for the freaking Num Lock key on the numerical keypad. (Which I assume would exist in roughly the same place on an AZERTY or other non-QWERTY but fully-equipped keyboard, yes?).

I’ll second this complaint. My current HP laptop (Win11, its Win10 predecessor had the same problem) lacks an indicator light to tell me if NumLock is on or off, which can be very annoying. I have dedicated up/down/left/right keys. I’d be thrilled to be able to set NumLock on and have it STAY on so my daily Excel spreadsheet entries (BP, fasting BG, and such) are a little more convenient.

[Unintentionally_Blank]

I hate when you’re touch typing and make a mistake because your hands are one key off, so instead of correcting the word ‘correcing’, you end up typeing correcin\]]]======

Before swearing a blue streak and correcing a dozen mistakes instead of one.

[Unintentionally_Blank]

Or an extra ‘b’ before sending an iMessage. Hey, phone, I’ve never sent a message that looked like:

I’ll see you there b

[SCAdian]

@jnglmassiv

My current laptop lacks dedicated Page Up & Page Down keys. I miss them a lot more than I anticipated. Func + Up/Down performs the same function but it isn’t the same.

Mine also lacks Home and End Keys. (It actually has buttons labelled for all four functions, but they’re actually just left, right, up, and down arrow keys, like the ones on the keypad.) And I don’t have a Func key to compensate.

[Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela]

Dvorak user since '98 - it took me about 4 weeks to get fluent, and I’ve never gone back.

[WildaBeast]

@AHunter3

I think PCs from some antediluvian era came with the numerical keypad but lacked the middle row of navigation keys (insert, home, page up, page down, end, fwd delete)?

Yep, I remember that from my family’s first computer from circa 1988. That was a PC clone, but it had the same keyboard layout as the old IBM machines, where the number keypad did double duty as the arrow keys and PgUp, PgDn, Home, End, Ins, and Del.

As a kid I found Num Lock annoying for kind of the opposite reason. I just wanted to play Frogger and Centipede and all the other old DOS games we had, which used the arrow keys as the controller. Since the arrow keys on that old keyboard were also the number keys, if Num Lock was turned on I couldn’t play my game. And those old keyboards didn’t have any indicator to show you whether Num Lock was on or off. You just had to press a key, and if it didn’t do what you wanted press Num Lock and try again.

I always thought PrtScn, Scroll Lock, and Pause/Break were the most anachronistic keys on modern keyboards. In the DOS days PrtScn would literally send whatever text was on your screen to the printer, if you had one hooked up. In Windows it’s been repurposed for taking screenshots, so I guess it still has some function. I honestly have no idea what Scroll Lock was ever for. In DOS pressing Ctrl-Break would kill whatever program you were were running, the same as Ctrl-C in Linux. I’m not sure what Pause/Break did on its own. It seems like maybe it was something for debugging back in the day, like for pausing a program and setting breakpoints, or something. I think maybe some games actually used it as the pause button.

[Napier]

@Crafter_Man

I will accidently hit the Caps Lock key when my intention was to hit the a key.

I have a more painful complaint, about the Sun workstation keyboards of the mid '90s. It was the Control key that was immediately left of the “a” key. My left little finger really leans at the end, and I’d often accidentally hit Control with the “a”. Instead of typing one letter “a”, this Ctrl-a selects ALL the text in whatever you’re working on. The next keystroke - we’re typing text here, quickly - overwrites all the text with whatever letter you’re typing. The keystroke after that flushes all that original text out of the 1-deep UNDO buffer, so there’s no way to retrieve it, not since the last Save.

So my Control key cap got pried off the switch pretty quickly. I wonder how many other Sun keyboards were missing their Control keys.

[eschereal]

@jnglmassiv

My current laptop lacks dedicated Page Up & Page Down keys. I miss them a lot more than I anticipated. Func + Up/Down performs the same function but it isn’t the same.

That might be ok if they put the Fn key near the cursor keys, but no, they have to have it way the hell over on the left only, so that it takes 2 hands to use the alternate functions.

[jnglmassiv]

@SCAdian

Mine also lacks Home and End Keys.

I’m back home now and, looking at my keyboard, I see it does have Home and End keys. Their secondary functions are Num Lock and Break.

@eschereal

… over on the left only, so that it takes 2 hands to use the alternate functions.

I don’t know if this is universal but I can press Fn, then the second key to perform the secondary function, good when one hand is messy like, say, eating chicken wings.

[74westy]

@Napier

I have a more painful complaint, about the Sun workstation keyboards of the mid '90s. It was the Control key that was immediately left of the “a” key. My left little finger really leans at the end, and I’d often accidentally hit Control with the “a”. Instead of typing one letter “a”, this Ctrl-a selects ALL the text in whatever you’re working on. The next keystroke - we’re typing text here, quickly - overwrites all the text with whatever letter you’re typing. The keystroke after that flushes all that original text out of the 1-deep UNDO buffer, so there’s no way to retrieve it, not since the last Save.

Thanks a lot. I thought I had banished that one from my memory but it’s all rushing back now.

[Die_Capacitrix]

Husband disabled CapsLock on his computer, which is a feature within the Apple operating system.

However, for certain German letters, Capslock is the standard way to make a capital letter. He never types in German, so I end up searching the internet for the capital letter and using copy paste.

And if there are different language layouts, the special symbols (apostrophe, exclamation mark) should be in the same place.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

@Machine_Elf

I have a Logitech K860 keyboard, and there’s a utility program with it that allows the user to disable:

• Num lock
• Caps lock
• Scroll lock
• insert
• Windows/Start key

You might consider getting one of these.

You don’t even need a utility program to do this. These are simple changes allowed for in the Windows Registry. Or do it through the free Microsoft PowerToys.

I thought everyone who is bothered by this would have fixed it by now.

[Pardel-Lux]

I remember that, I loved it! I used to translate back then, and I could not only put the ñ and Ñ and ç and ¡¿ where I wanted on my German keyboard, substituting for some useless key (I found just enough), but I also made my computer worthless to thieves (not that it ever got stolen). I felt smugly smart.
Apart from that, my only complaint about QWERTY is that it should be QWERTZ, as in fact it is in the computers I own.

[bob_2]

@Tim_T-Bonham.net

I thought everyone who is bothered by this would have fixed it by now.

Caps Lock is one of my bugbears too, so having read several posts, I thought I would disable it. However, I use W11 and after a search, I find that the only way to achieve that is to edit the registry.

I could do it, but there are some occasions when I do want it, so I guess I’ll have to live with it.

I use a M’soft Surface with a keyboard and apart from this, I think they got the design about right. There’s no number pad so no numlock and pgup/dwn are there, as is home and end. They also kept PrtScn which I use.

[pjd]

I don’t have Word or Excel… i tried Wordpad but it doesn’t seem to do
anything in that ! Oh well, i’ve had this laptop over 10 years without using it so i guess there’s no point starting now.
And i agree that the Capslock key would be better off somewhere else.

[Seanette]

@Die_Capacitrix

However, for certain German letters, Capslock is the standard way to make a capital letter. He never types in German, so I end up searching the internet for the capital letter and using copy paste.

Windows does have a Character Map app that should allow you to more easily find the character you need to C&P.