What's A 'Scroll Lock' And Why Is It On My Keyboard? 866
Jeff Bauer writes "Today's article in The Straight Dope explains all
the weird keys that come with standard PC keyboards. Now if someone could just explain what the 'Alt Graph' key does on my Sun keyboard, enlightement would be at hand ..."
Scroll lock is useful in Linux terminals (Score:5, Informative)
Many people think that scroll lock is now useless, except in Microsoft Excel, but it does have a much more useful purpose, at least in Linux and perhaps BSD.
Fark (Score:1, Informative)
Alt Graph on Sun-boxen ... (Score:5, Informative)
\@${[]}|~?
Not sure about the US keymap, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to go without Alt Graph.
The ` key (Score:3, Informative)
Use for the tilde key (Score:3, Informative)
Re:real application! (Score:3, Informative)
Try "| sort | more" instead
Re:Windows Key (Score:1, Informative)
Win+F - Search files
Win+E - File manager
Win+M - Minimize pr0n, the boss is around
the corp. buys me that Thinkpad that doesn't have it.
Re:Losing the Insert key (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Use for the tilde key (Score:2, Informative)
0xbeefbabe & (~0x04) == 0xbeefbabe & 0xfffffff8
Alt Graph.... (Score:4, Informative)
ISTR that AltGraph+Help did something on older Sun machines, but I can't recall what.
Re:Use for the tilde key (Score:3, Informative)
say char boing = 0x55;
char gniob = ~boing;
Re:real application! (Score:2, Informative)
# cat text > booda
in another window:
# cat booda > somefile
voila
Re:Scroll lock is useful in Linux terminals (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wrong! (Score:5, Informative)
Yes it does. It shares the same keycap as F14.
Re:Scroll lock is useful in Linux terminals (Score:4, Informative)
P.S. this works places other than Unix also.
Re:real application! (Score:5, Informative)
You must have it installed from somewhere else, or as part of the admin pack or whatever. Its obvioulsy just a program which puts the stdin input into the clipboard, pretty useful, but not included by default.
Re:real application! (Score:5, Informative)
ADB Apple Extended Keyboard II (Score:1, Informative)
Now, it might be that some of the newer mac keyboards don't have scroll lock, but the original ADB extended keyboards did. For example, I have a USB spanish mac keyboard that doesn't have those extra labels.
Re:real application! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:real application! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:real application! (Score:5, Informative)
$ ls | xclip -i
does what you'd expect.
Re:MS Office scroll lock peeve (Score:3, Informative)
Xon/Xoff history lesson: blame microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
this dates back to the teletype and is enshrined in the ascii alphabet as Xon and Xoff. Originally it was intended not as a scroll lock but as a way for a teletype or printer to not overflow its fixed hardware buffer. The communication baud rate could easily out pace the tele type printers print speed. when the hardware buffer was nearly full it would send an X-off (contol-s) to the sender to pause its communications. When the buffer was printed the teletype would send a X-on back to the sender to resume spewing.
There was no need for scoll locking functionality on a teletype printer since you could just hold up the paper and look at it back as many lines as you wanted.
but when dumb video terminals came along the terminals could print as fast as the data came in the X-on and X-off functions had little use as a communications protocol, but Now they were useful to humans as a scroll lock. they had at most 40 lines of text and once you scrolled off the top of the screen, you lost that line forever. There were no "windows" or "scroll bars". So you had your fingers poised over the contrl-s key to halt the text from flowing off the screen.
finally along came the PC and Microsoft messed with all the unix converions in their VMS/CPM ripoff called dos: so you could not be sure that control-S would actually work. In part this was because DOS was not really multitasking. programs could take over the OS and capture all the interupts and put hooks directly into the keyboard handler. Since there were no Menus and the "alt" key had not come into its standard defintion yet, the control keys were premium realestate for programs to hook functions into.
thus there was a need for another semaphore. So things like scroll lock and sysRequest, and print screen got added. So yes virgina you can blame MS for these keys as valuable male breasts or an appendix.
Re:real application! (Score:5, Informative)
Clip is one of the utilities from http://www.cmdtools.com/
Yes: Screen (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the clipboard is a property of the environment, rather than the OS. But there's certainly at least one environment that allows this: GNU screen [fu-berlin.de].
Screen has a concept of a buffer file that can be used to store or load the clipboard. The name of this file is defined in your screenrc, so it can vary from system to system, but it's often called /tmp/screen-xchg or (better for multi-user systems) ~/.screen_exchange. The keystroke ^A< reads this file and ^A> writes it; ^A> will also flash up a message telling you what the name of the file is (for example, Copybuffer written to "/tmp/screen-xchg" ).
So what you do is:
And there you have it.
Re:Here's an idea (Score:2, Informative)
Fan of Michael Moorcock I presume? (Score:4, Informative)
Well call me Catherine Cornelius and break out the psychotropic lesbian porn fiction...
Well it is true to the spirit of Moorcock. Just look at the cover art [eclipse.co.uk].
Ok, so it is a touch off-topic, but I was stunned to see a literary(sic) reference in a /. link
Q.
Re:What's the deal with the really weird key? (Score:2, Informative)
It's useful if you are typing, with your hand away from the mouse, and want to do a right click on th highlighted item.
Really...
Also for execute (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mad Props (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Scroll lock is useful in Linux terminals (Score:2, Informative)
Back Scrolling
The syscons driver allows the user to browse the output which has
``scrolled off'' the top of the screen.
Press the ``slock'' key (usually ScrllLock / Scroll Lock or Pause on many
keyboards) and the terminal is in the ``scrollback'' mode. It is indi-
cated by the Scroll Lock LED. Use the arrow keys, the Page Up/Down keys
and the Home/End keys to scroll buffered terminal output. Press the
``slock'' key again to get back to the normal terminal mode.
The size of the scrollback buffer can be set by the SC_HISTORY_SIZE
option described below.
Re:real application! - clip tool (Score:2, Informative)
cmdtools website [cmdtools.com] "clip" is near the bottom of the page
clip.zip [cmdtools.com] direct download
Re:real application! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Scroll lock is useful in Linux terminals (Score:3, Informative)
NO! Not in "BSD", ONLY in FreeBSD... FreeBSD is not the end-all, be-all BSD, thank you very much.
Yes, and here it is. (Score:3, Informative)
In theory, after running "apt-get install xclip" you can do things like
and the primary X selection will be loaded up with the output, all reading for middle-clicking. Likewise, you can sweep a bunch of text and use it with
Other options let you use other clipboards, etc.
In practice, you can't just apt-get it. You have to apt-get the source, apply the content negotiation patch [debian.org], and run buildpackage yourself. Then it works perfectly. (I have no clue what content negotiation means, but apparently kde wants it.)
SysReq (Score:2, Informative)
Think of it as a key dedicated to the unix 'kill' command.
~dlb
Magic SysRq (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wrong! (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not entirely certain what article you thought you read, but according to Una:
The main intent of the Scroll Lock key was to allow scrolling of screen text up, down and presumably sideways using the arrow keys in the days before large displays and graphical scroll bars.
According to you, it sounds like Una got it right at the start.
RTFA
Just a thought but... (Score:4, Informative)
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)/windo
etc, etc, etc...
The C: drive thingies are just useful for the Win32API, so opening new files off that drive won't work, and explorer will probably fail in mysterious ways later on, if the C: is mentioned anywhere in the registry where it might be used to dynamically load some view or file operation.
As you might expect, drives letters are just places where to start a mapping to a mounted filesystem (which is internally identified with a GUID, like everything else, the drive letter has no significance). Windows only needs C: to boot and load programs, but if you aren't opening files, you don't need it.
Re:real application! (Score:3, Informative)
type reallybigfile.txt | clip
Care to elaborate?
Sun Keyboards (Score:2, Informative)
Re:real application! (Score:3, Informative)
For example, is you issue the command:
cat somefile | pbcopy
the clipboard receives the contents of somefile, whereas if you type:
pbpaste > somefile
puts the contents of the clipboard into the file somefile.
Re:Alt Graph on Sun-boxen ... (Score:5, Informative)
On keyboards in general, most keys generates two characters. This is fine for English, not using any letters besides A-Z or any accents as far as ASCII is concerned.
However, for many European languages, there are additional characters, like a+ring (U+0035) in Swedish, and accented characters, like e+acute (U+00E9) in French. Since back in the days of XTs, there were only 83/84 keys to go around, they made some keys produce a third and sometimes fourth character. These were accessed by pressing Ctrl and Alt for the third char and Ctrl, Alt and Shift for the fourth char and then the key.
At some point, it was (rightfully) decided this was unnecessarily clunky. Keyboard BIOSes/drivers were changed to support the Mac-style input of accent + character to generate that character accented. That still left the 'standard' for older keyboards to be backward compatible with, and other chars that didn't fit that pattern.
So when the 101/102 key keyboards came out, for European languages that changed the right Alt key to Alt Gr, or alternate graphic. (For some languages it had a different abbreviation, like Alt Car). This allowed typing Alt Gr plus one of the 3- or 4-character keys to access the 3rd (and with Shift, the 4th) character. Still a pain, but less so than a 3 or 4 finger salute to get a single character.
Re:More interesting question migth be... (Score:3, Informative)
Mind you, this is not a registry thing because you actually need code to run it. With this, caps lock will go uppercase, and CTRL will release the lock.
Re:An old one (Score:3, Informative)
Console Switch (Score:1, Informative)
On Belkin KVMs:
[Scroll Lock]-[Scroll Lock]-UP
(answered earlier in this thread) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Windows Key (Score:3, Informative)
Re:SysReq (Score:3, Informative)
I really doubt that ``it's days are numbered.''
Alt-GR (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, we get often used charatcers like aeoa as primary keys, and have access "# with Shift + 2, 3 and 4.
This is all based on a danish keyboard. Some people have grown beyond US-ASCII (7-bit crap)
Re:Wrong! (Score:2, Informative)
wmaker: wxcopy, wxpaste (Score:2, Informative)
In Window Maker, 'wxcopy --help' and 'wxpaste --help' for help on using those.
I'm afraid I don't know about the others. Anyone? Anyone?
Re:Windows Key (Score:3, Informative)
WHERE ARE MY HOTKEYS???"
Wherever you set them.
I have alt+c close current window, alt+k,c to sigkill it, alt+mwheeldown/up to cycle through tabs in my current pane (I use ion. I'll provide screenshots if someone asks). Then theres the GNU ReadLine shorcuts that a lot of apps respect(most because they actually use ReadLine, then the rest just because theyre standard.
^A - begining of line
^E - end of line
^K - delete text from cursor to end of line
^U - delete text from cursor to begining of line
^V - insert raw char regardless of other bindings
Theres plenty more, see man ReadLine. They're all configurable of course.
Re:Windows Key (Score:4, Informative)
Missing some info (Score:4, Informative)
The Print Screen/SysRq key was used in Dos to send the current screen of text directly to lpt1: (your printer), hence the name "Print Screen". In Windows (all the way back to Windows 3.x), Print Screen executes a screen capture (without the mouse cursor) and puts it on the clipboard. Alt+PrintScreen copies just the current window.
In addition to what was said in the article about Pause/Break, pressing it _during_ a dir or other scrolling text operation will halt the screen. (This includes during booting before the OS loads.) Press any key to continue.
As for the `/~ key? Still haven't found a useful function for it other than typing a ` or a ~.
And the |? That one serves just about the same purpose to me as the "Context Menu" button on many newer keyboards, which is to say, none.
Re:Just a thought but... (Score:1, Informative)
Unmounting forces a flush, so it can have a purpose though. Heck, even trying to lock a volume / file system will flush it for you. How's that for a sync
Re:real application! (Score:3, Informative)
What's Alt Gr for? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:real application! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:real application! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Alt Graph on WinDOS (Score:1, Informative)
Re:real application! (Score:3, Informative)
I use it for... (Score:1, Informative)
If I hit Ctrl then hit Esc (not to be confused with pressing them at the same time) on my Black Box KVM switch, I get an OSD that allows me to navigate to the terminal I want (very nice when you have 30 servers on KVMs).
Re:real application! (Score:2, Informative)
Scroll lock lives (Score:2, Informative)
It's here [scroll-lock-lives.com].
(Plug alert: I work for Platonix; this is a toy).