Looking at my keyboard, I’m pretty sure I’ve never had a reason to press F6, F7, F9, F11, Scroll Lock, Num Lock, the menu bar key, the button immediately left of 1 that I don’t know the name of, the / on the keypad, the . on the keypad, Page Up or Page Down.
What keys have you completely ignored?
In addition to some of the OP’s examples, I never use the Pause/Break key. I feel sorry for people who haven’t discovered the joys of Page Up and Page Down, though.
I’ve used every single one of them but some of them only in testing keyboard drivers. In general use I rarely use the F1-F12 keys, Fn, Scroll Lock, Num Lock, or even Caps Lock. The Alt for infrequently entering a Unicode character. The Insert and Windows key are annoyances that I don’t need. The graphic keys all get used a lot in coding and the arrows are indispensable in modern computing.
I don’t use the function keys F1 - F12 much any more, but I used them all time back when I was running WordPerfect under DOS. (That was a great program that I much prefer to Word).
I don’t think I’ve purposely ever used Insert. I hate it when I hit it by accident. (Come to think of it, I believe Ctl-Ins works the same as Ctl-p for paste or at least used to. I believe I used to do that.)
I very seldom use the `, but I do use ~ a lot, so I’m not sure if you want to count that key.
I almost never use the right Alt or Ctl keys.
The “Any” key ----> budm tishh
Back in the day (i.e. before Windows, and mice), some of those keys were pretty darn useful.
I only use F5, for refresh. None of the other F keys.
I never use the grave accent, to the left of the 1, the lower case of the ~. I never use ~, either, but I sometimes see other people use it. Underscore is completely useless because it is not a dead key, so cannot be used to underscore. Several others I have never used are { } | but I know they have to be there for programming…
There are a few on my laptop that are pictographs, which I am afraid to touch, because I have no idea what the hell they will disable. I never use the exclamation point, because in most fonts, it looks too much like a terminal L in the last word. I only use ampersand if I am writing a trade name that includes it, like A&W. It is easier to type “and” than to shift and search the top row for the ampersand. I often leave the apostrophe out of contractions, because in their infinite wisdom, the qwerty designers put the semicolon in a touch-type position, and the apostrophe way the hell out somewhere, different places on different keyboards. And I nevr never never use the semicolon, the only mark the qwerty people though important enough to give it an alphabetic position. At least, you don’t have to use the shift key anymore to type “don’t”, like on mechanical typewriters.
I’d replace some junk keys with symbols for degree and euro. I wish there were a simple, user-friendly way to reassign keys. Or even a blank key that the user can assign according to need.
I used to use pause and break quite a bit, back in the DOS/programming days. Break (and Control-C) was great for stopping a program or command line that was out of control or just taking too long, pause was great for running DOS command that would scroll multiple pages of data without telling it to stop at each page…as long as you could pause it at the right time. It’s also helpful (still?) for pausing your computer while it’s booting to make sure things like drives and memory are loading correctly.
And, FWIW, Win-Break brings up the System menu.
I, forever, used Control-Del, Control Insert. I never quite understood why people almost get offended that I do that. The two keys are very close to each other, the shortcuts make sense (delete cuts (or copies in cases of undeletable text), insert pastes). It wasn’t until just recently that I started using Control-V because my new laptop forced me to involve the Fn key to access insert. After doing it one way for so long, I’m still not used to it.
ETA, F1, will access the help menu in most programs, which is really annoying in one specific program that I use which makes very heavy use of the escape key and has a VERY slow loading help menu. Really slows down my workflow when I bump escape and have to sit there for 30-60s waiting for it to load.
Looking at my keyboard (and this is a Mac layout), the ones I don’t think I’ve ever used are F13,F14,F15,F16, “help,” “home,” “end,” and probably that other delete key that is under the “help” key. Heck, I didn’t even realize there was a “help” key and I’ve used some variant of this keyboard for at least a decade.
Also, on the numeric keypad “clear”. Huh. I’m not entirely sure I ever noticed it there. I mean, yeah, I noticed it on calculators, but didn’t realize my keyboard had it.
ETA: Heh, how 'bout that? “Home” and “end” will scroll to the front and end of a webpage, just like you’d expect them to. I would always just page up and down or use the scroll on my mouse. Why it’s never occurred to me to try it before, I don’t know.
Play enough PC games and you’ll use all the F keys at some point.
While I have used the Print Screen key, this keyboard had an alternate function of “SysRq” for it that I’m completely ignorant on. I couldn’t even guess with confidence what “SysRq” stands for. System… Request?
I have not used the { or } very much…
I don’t think I’ve ever had a reason to use the ‘home’ key.
“Insert” and “Caps-Lock” cost so much time when pressed accidentally that the time saved when pressed on purpose is already spent with interest.
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On my current computer: F1, F6, F7, F8, F11, F12, ins, and menu. I used F5 once with unexpected and unfortunate results when I first got this computer. On my old computer it did something different.
I think I only ever use the Ctrl and Alt keys on the left side, never the right.
They also move the cursor all the way to the end/beginning of the line. I use them all the time when editing any text. I used it just a few seconds ago, when deleting part of the quoted text above. Shift-Home and Shift-End are also useful, to highlight all the text to the left/right of the current cursor position. If I want to delete the first half of a line of text, I’d move the cursor to the middle, hit Shift-Home, then Delete.
Since I use these keys so much, I would only buy keyboards that have the Ins/Home/PgUp - Del/End/PgDn keys in the standard 3x2 arrangement above the arrow keys.
In case it helps anyone, in the latest versions of Word you can disable the “Ins = overtype” ‘feature’. Not sure about Caps Lock, but they have also added an icon that lets you change the case of a bunch of text all at once, which can be useful in solving Caps Lock catastrophes.
I’m 100% certain that I’ve used all of them. Maybe there are fancy keyboards which have extra keys I haven’t used, but I’ve been all over the standard 101-key keyboard.
Because of games that I have played I have probably used every key at least once but Scroll Lock would probably be the one I hit the least.
System Request is exactly right. In the DOS days, there was a need to send commands to the OS directly, bypassing the currently running application. You could use SysRq to do that, since the BIOS gave that key a special interrupt that hooked into the OS directly and could not be read by the application. You can still use it to do some low-level things in Linux today; Alt+SysRq+ the characters REISUB in sequence was the typical way to safely reboot a totally frozen system. Nowadays, the Magic SysRq key is typically disabled by the kernel, but can be enabled if you know what you’re doing.