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A keyboard curious question I have probably never used the "Print Screen / Sys Rq" and the "Scroll Lock" Keys. What are they for? And do applications still use them?
S.C.
Print screen puts a picture of the screen on the clipboard for you to use as a screenshot. I believe Scroll Lock was used in the old days of DOS when you could pause a scrolling eg directory list which would ordinarily scroll straight past you on the screen, and if it was long you wouldn't be able to read it all. Could be wrong on that though. And I have no idea what Sys Rq was for!
James U-S
Scroll lock is still handy in Excel.
Ged Byrne
Helpfully, alt - Print Screen does a screenshot of the active window (ideal for bug reports).
a cynic writes...
In DOS, PrtScrn dumped the contents of the screen directly to the printer. In many spreadsheets, Scroll lock changed from moving the cursor around a fixed screen to moving the screen around a fixed cursor. I've heard that SysRq was something to do with IBM mainframes.
A.T.
Scroll lock is also useful to scroll round SVG pictures in Adobe's awful SVG plugin
Harvey Pengwyn
Funnily enough a charity I used to work for had a research director who took against the caps lock key in no uncertain fashion.
a cynic writes...
http://www.fact-index.com/s/sy/sysrq.html
KeY
On IBM AS/400s, the SysRq function is used to bring up a menu that operates outside of your normal mainframe job. In our environment it is most often used to spawn a second, parallel terminal session from the same physical terminal. The user can then toggle between the two sessions.
Brian
"So for those and other similarly useless keys, I reassigned them to more useful things."
Tom H
I like my caps lock just fine. It's not my problem if you're a clumsy typist.
muppet
As someone else said, scroll lock is used in many apps such as Excel to scroll the whole window with the arrow keys instead of just moving the cursor location. Otherwise, to scroll the window with the keyboard you'd first have to move the cursor all the way to the edge and only then would further presses scroll the window. Also, it keeps your cursor position. It's actually really handy if you want stay where you are but see a little more data on one side.
Some Ranting Idiot
Scroll Lock is also a great "is the computer awake?" light. It toggles the LED, showing activity, but you can be confident that it won't adversely affect a program.
EAW
Gadwin Systems has a freeware ScreenShot grabber that can be activated by just about any otherwise useless key, including prt scr/sysrq:
jdm
Double tapping the scroll lock key on my keyboard activates my KVM switch.
muppet
We need to add keyboard keys to toggle Bold, Italics, and Underline. And a pair of keys (or a wheel or something) to switch windows (replacing Alt-Tab).
Derek
KC
In WinXP, the accessibility options have a setting where a sound is played whenever you turn on or off Caps Lock and Num Lock. It's literally the first thing I do to a new XP install. Check it out.
JWA
muppet--
mb
+++muppet--
muppet
muppet, I thought we'd established that you *do* use a smart editor/IDE. Big Time! The auto-completin'-spell-checkin'-syntax-highligthin'-
JD
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