Home, End, pgup, pgdn

[6730b]

Anyone knows of some way to get those navigation buttons to work without the damn Fn, whatever way to control their behaviour. Or am I missing some obvious setting somewhere.

One hand navigation here (in browsers) is space \ shift space, passable, but would have been so much better to simply get those keys to do what is printed on them, with one finger, and rather do line scrolling with Fn+pgup\pgdn

[Aaron44126]

These four keys are what I hate most about Dell's modern keyboard layouts...

 

This is your keyboard?

 

It's even worse than the current Precisions (which have Home/End up at the top sharing with F11 and F12).

 

I use SharpKeys to remap some of the keys and make it more usable.  I have mapped "Right Alt" to PgUp and "Right Ctrl" to PgDn, for example, so those can be used without a press of the Fn key.  (You can also use MS PowerToys which has a key remapping function.)

 

You could "cross-map" the arrow keys and PgUp/PgDn/Home/End to effectively reverse which ones you need to press "Fn" for.  (Map "Left arrow" to "Home" and then map "Home" to "Left arrow".  Repeat for the other keys.)  I imagine that'd be a pain whenever you want to use the actual arrow functions, though.

 

...Bit of a pain if you switch between using the laptop keyboard and an external/USB keyboard.  The mappings will apply to the external keyboard as well.

[6730b]

Thanks, will try SharpKeys. No external keyboard.

[6730b]

Some fun testing SharpKeys, it works! Now got PgUp & PgDn working 👍. And made caps lock open calculator.
Once getting to know the app, seems there is much useful to be done. Thanks for the tip.

[6730b]

Update, happy to have practical (1 hand) pg up \ pg dn. See attach.
Used SharpKeys to reassign some 'free' keys never in use on my keyboard version (not the same as picture).

Was thinking all keyboards should have a few extra free\not assigned keys, to allow for personalization without interfering with any original key actions.

Also... what about a (well made, well designed) strip of keys between the space bar and the touch pad, with all the navigation keys in on place, accessible with one finger from the touchpad :O)

[Ionising_Radiation]

On 7/20/2022 at 2:41 AM, Aaron44126 said:

These four keys are what I hate most about Dell's modern keyboard layouts...

it really is just poor design. Those keys can absolutely fit in a minimal keyboard layout, see the old Clevo W230Sx series, which was my old laptop before I got a Precision 7530:

[Sandy Bridge]

Yeah, the W230ST design is the same as what my old Inspiron 1520 design used.  Full-height arrow keys, Home/Page Up/Page Down/End right there.  I don't know why that isn't much more common than the largely poor keyboards of today.

 

SharpKeys is great for remapping, but my top advice is research the keyboards of laptops you are considering buying and don't buy one with a bad layout.  In 2018, I bought a laptop with a GTX 1050 instead of a GTX 1060 at the same price because the GTX 1050 one had a better keyboard layout.  You're going to be interacting with the keyboard all the time, it's important to have a key layout that won't drive you crazy.

 

At work, where I have the laptop with the worst keyboard ever (MacBook Pro with a butterfly keyboard), I just take an external bluetooth keyboard to every meeting that I bring the laptop to, and have a Microsoft Natural 4000 at my desk so I never have to use its internal keyboard.  Not ideal by any means but "portable keyboard with better keys/layout" is an option as well.