Comments on The Once-Mighty Home Key

Home key works in Word 2007....not sure what you are talking about there Jen...

My Home key takes me to the top of the web page, and the End key takes me to the bottom. They're handy enough.

Before posting about an experience that you think will be universal, try putting down the crack pipe. Home key only brings you "to the top of your document" on a Mac, it brings you to the start of the line on a PC ... and it works fine as far as I can tell.

Perhaps, your scroll lock button is on?

seriously?, wow, maybe reporters shouldn't report on topics they know nothing about without doing research eh?.

in all word processing

home -> beginning of line
ctrl+home -> beginning of file
ctrl+shift+home -> select from cursor to beginning of file
shift+home -> select from cursor to beginning of line

You're probably on a Mac, where for some reason the Home key does nothing. It is very useful in Windows; I use ctrl+home all the time.

i don't have a home key on my macbook. actually, i just saw it. it's an alternate key for the left arrow key. i don't think i've ever used it since my family has had computers, which was probably around 1990.

No, the Home key still serves a function. The real mysteries are why Scroll Lock and SysRq are still on the PC keyboard. Hell, I can't even recall Scroll Lock serving any particular purpose on early 80s PCs.

your home key must be fucked up. Mine magically transports me to Oz.

@8, I have to click mine three times for that.

You mean it doesn't even take you to the top of a web page Jen?

I got kicked out last night without my Valentine from Ais. They'd better hold it for me, that was the sweetest thing I have ever received in my life. (Save my Jew, of course.)

kicked out of where?

Not only can't I figure out my Home key, but I can't find good carbon paper for my mimeograph machine any more, either.

Um, what everybody else said. My home key works fine, and I use it all the time while word-processing.

I use Print Screen, too, but I've never used Pause/Break. I don't even know what that means, but it's a little scary, because I usually don't want my computer to ever pause or break.

ease up assholes...it was a fuckin valid point.

even if the fuckin thing does work, hotkeys are sooo 90's. it's the 2000's get a mouse with a wheel. it only takes two swipes of that thing and you're up.

you probably use the meek 'in-to-the-muthafuckin-sert' key too.

fuckin home key apoligists.

(ps, next time you see a fuckin crack addict use a fuckin computer I WOULD LIKE TO FUCKIN KNOW)

What the fuck is a home key?

I think scroll lock kept the page from scrolling down when you hold the up or down keys... doesn't seem to work now, though.

Maybe PC keyboard manufacturers just didn't like getting rid of the third light?

I can never find the Any key.

slow news day, eh?

Try this:

Type "keyboard shortcuts home" in the Help search field (Word 2003 on WinXP). Boom! Takes you to the keyboard shortcuts. But it's a very long page, with just a list of collapsed headings. Which one describes the Home key? Hit CTRL+F and find home. Result: Nada.

First you have to expand all the entries. Then you can step through all the instances of Home, discovering that it does something different in each of 14 different contexts. Home does take you to the beginning of the document, but only in Reading Layout. In Normal, it only takes you to the beginning of the line.

So I don't blame anybody for being confused about how to use Word. It's a nightmare of a tool for any one purpose. If you want to use it to do everything all at once, I suppose it's nice, but it's hard to imagine when anybody needs to do everything at once.

My question for the Stranger writers is why you use a heavy formatting word processor to write for a newspaper. Isn't the layout and formatting done much later on? One would think you'd write with a text editor like TextEdit or TextPad so that you turn in your stories in plain text. I can see using Word if you were self-publishing, but why waste time creating a ton for formatting and layout that is going to be thrown away?

Hey cunt fonda, take your own damn advice. I'm sorry you don't work on anything longer than 2 pages, but it would take me 10 minues to scroll up to the top of most excel files I work with or some documents. ctrl-home works wonders.

WHERE THE FUCK IS THE MORNING NEWS ALREADY???!!!!

I believe break used to kill misbehaving command line programs that were in an infinite loop. These days though we just give them the three finger salute. I have seen some scripting environments use ctrl-break to end execution and I think it still works in the Windows command line.

@ 22: Fo' rill! I gotta know what's happening!

You can never go home again.

End, Shift+Home = wonderful for quickly deleting lines.

I'm so happy to see someone other than ECB get their ass chewed on the SLOG.

it returns you to the beginning of the line, wherever you are, but you've got to be using linux...

No you don't, przxggl.

I think the morning news is here: http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/the_morning_news_372 next to yesterday's, because Erica put the wrong date on it.

MORAL: Make no proclamations about your computer on a public forum in a city overrun with angry, sexually frustrated computer nerds.

Ctrl-home takes me to the top of this worthless thread. I guess I know about computers and stuff.

@30: Sexually frustrated? I think someone is projecting.

Mr. Poe: Aw, that's too bad, I hope it's recoverable!

I had never bothered to hit "Home" before, but now I will use it (and "End") at every opportunity. See? Slog IS educational.

I have a worse time with the bold key that seems to be so common on some peoples' posts - to add emphasis. In fact, it's in the hard version of the paper too. Whose idea was that?(Yes, I know, there is no bold key).

@21

no, i won't take my own advice.

either you have really slow fingers (and i HATE people with slow fingers) or you're lying (and i LOVE liars).

cunt fonda, you must not do any serious typing. Losing milliseconds switching to the mouse when coding or really writing is a pain in the ass.

fuckin old, washed up, half-senile actors forgettin to take their medicines and getting upset...

It works fine in WoW.

Just ask my female Gnome rogue Fierfli or my male Troll warrior Nobunifuru ...

elenchos @20, the publishing process you describe (write in plain text, then format later) was state-of-the-art at my high school newspaper in 1986.

Publishers now have printing processes that can retain formatting from the originally authored Word document (and/or other common formats), though some use XML authoring tools, and PDF is probably pretty common too. I haven't worked in a newspaper since then, but I am a technical writer. We write in Word using specific templates, with are then repurposed for either online or dead tree format. Sometimes we use a simple converter to produce PDF versions for people who don't have Word and want to self-print. Welcome to the 21st century!

cunt fonda: Wow, you're some kind of power user, huh? My 80-year-old mother is the only one I know who reaches for her mouse every time she wants to go to the top of a page (or copy, or paste, or close a window...)

Home works. Ctl-Break stops code execution in various programming environments. Insert is useful too.

There's one key on a standard keyboard that's outlasted its usefulness to the point of being evil: NumLock. It's a vestigial organ left over from when keyboards had no separate middle section for arrows/home/pg dn/etc. There's nothing in the keyboard world more irritating than trying to type some numbers and instead having your cursor jump all over the screen.

@7, re scroll lock --

Scroll lock works in Excel. It lets you move the screen view without changing cursor position. Try it!

The key I hate is F1 in windows. F2 is a great shortcut for editing values in Excel, but that damn F1 is too close and brings up a painfully slow 'help' (yeah right) window when you hit it accidentally. I bent up a paperclip and put it under the F1 key so it takes some extra effort to press.

Actually, FWIW, we used to use ESC more often than BREAK or Ctrl-BREAK back in the days of early coding.

Nobody ever liked NumLock - that was forced on us by Accounting - and IBM trying to sell machines to them. That's why some keyboards made it light up with a special light on the key itself (not just above the keypad) so we could turn it off.

But it is useful when coding in Hex or digital ASCII codes.

@41 - ah, so something uses it. I heard at some point that was what Scroll Lock was supposed to do, but none of the word processors I used actually did. Go figure.

Now if we could only figure out why the "SysRq" key (or its position as alternative functionality of the Print Screen key) has survived.

#5 needs to do a little research as well. I love delusional PC user's who have convinced themselves that their pathetic little computers come anywhere near the quality of a Mac. It's like comparing a K-car to a Ferrari.

Home key on a Mac takes you to the top of the page, or the beginning of the document, depending on what you're viewing.

Moron.

MT @41, don @40: pry just a little further with that paperclip and the offending key will pop right off and you'll never hit it by accident again. I always pop the Caps Lock key off my keyboards, because I frequently hit it by accident, and I NEVER WANT IT IN REAL LIFE. There, I typed that with the regular shift key down with my pinky. If you do need to use the missing key sometime, just poke the hole with a pen.

Will @42: "back in the days of early coding", SURE you did. Your description of how NumLock works isn't even correct. It's like a pathology with you, isn't it?

@36

BINGO! i do serious CLICKING. very serious. my current favorite mouse has 6 buttons.

and @39 my mouse is, like, always in my hand.

@44 does your mac have neon? didn't think so. and do dudes named todd really use macs? next you'll tell me that you've never owned a camero.

buttons to remove list:
home
end
F5 & F7
ins

No, you're confusing NumLock usage now with later boards. And SysRq (or System Request) was useful on certain command prompt system when you were stuck in a program loop too.

Num Lock turns the keypad (which has cursor keys) into a numeric-only keypad, so that accountants can type numbers real fast. Instead of using the top row digits. When it's off (unlocked), the keys on many modern ones have the function of Home PgUp, End, Down as well, but those keys nowadays are replicated in a 6 key pad also - originally we didn't have both the num pad and the key pad, we only had the ASCII pad and the num pad, and Function keys came next.

You ever built an S-100 bus computer from scratch, soldering the boards yourself? Using an oscilliscope to test the circuits?

I have.

Nerds.

This is worse than the "What White People Like" post.