My Dell XPS 13 is getting old, starting to have problems, the day I order a Framework 13 is getting closer and closer.
But one thing is going to grieve me greatly: No page up/page down keys. (I’ll also miss home and end, but not so much.)
Am I the only one who reads stuff on his/er computer? Am I the only one who might have a cup of coffee in hand? Being able to do basic navigation with one hand is valuable. I switch tabs with one hand, too (ctrl-page up and ctrl-page down).
You have mini keys for up and down arrows, please turn the left and right arrows into mini keys, too, and put page up and page down in the top positions.
Or is there some ISO and ANSI enforcement squad that will send goons out with a baseball bats to break your legs if you do that? (Could a third party do it and not trigger retribution?)
I don’t need a Framework 13 yet, so someone, please fix this before I do.
Thanks,
-kb, the Kent who really appreciates that the 13 even exists, the fad of notebook computers not being small enough to use on an airplane is even sillier than no page up/page down keys.
P.S. New XPS 13s don’t seem to have page up and page down keys, either. I guess they are afraid of the ANSI and OSI goons’ baseball bats, too. :sigh:
The Framework 13 sitting in front of me right now has page up and down as well as home and end in the lower right corner of the key board. The “pg” page keys require using the “fn” (function key) to trigger page up and down as do the home and end keys, but they and the “arrow” (cursor movement keys) are available.
Needing to press multiple keys is annoying for something so basic, and gets difficult when wanting to do a key combination that includes page up or page down.
And looking at a keyboard image the fn key is a long way from the page up, down, home, and end. No way a normal person could do that one-handed.
Locking the fn would make page up/page down (plus home and end) single key presses, but now I am without arrow keys. Arrow keys are pretty useful, too.
Certainly there are ways of living with no dedicated page up and page down keys, and I appreciate suggestions, but being able to buy a keyboard that actually has those keys—as dedicated keys—would be even more appreciated.
I’ve never really gotten over the loss of the 7-row Thinkpad layout. I only briefly used one of those keyboards, but it was great.
It’s probably too much to ask for, but maybe some day Framework can make a classic Thinkpad keyboard layout knock-off.
I get by these problems myself using some mixture of the space bar, Ctrl-f / Ctrl-b for Page Up and Page Down, and two-finger scrolling on the touchpad. I’ve got CapsLock mapped to Control and run the Tridactyl plugin in Firefox, which is one of those Vim-similar control plugins. It’s pretty comfortable for the most part.
Oh, and Ctrl-tab / Ctrl-shift-tab to switch tabs, and I’ve got that setting to always open new tabs adjacent to the current tab turned on.
Yes, my XPS 13 was getting too worrisome so I got a new Ryzen Framework 13, and on my unit the fn lock only seems to work for the top row function keys, not the arrow-keys.
Fn lock doesn’t lock the arrow-keys. If you’re on Linux, I know a key remapper config that should provide locking arrow alt functions. If on Windows, there might be something, but I don’t know it. You need a key remapper that can do layers.
I don’t think anyone has tested the locking config yet. I meant to install keyd to test that config but didn’t get it.
Fn can’t be used because Fn isn’t ever a “real” key, on any laptop, that is passed to the OS, instead the keyboard firmware handles it entirely outside the OS.
I think… it doesn’t.
I recall FW staff saying the arrows were intentionally not included in Fn-lock. I searched a tiny bit for their post, it was fairly recent.
~edit~ found it. Not recent, but the thread was recently brought up
I’ll try keyd—but not immediately, I haven’t started setting up “house keeping” yet, I’m still in an investigation phase; what if I have to reinstall or switch distributions‽‽ (I do like the toggle better than a simple right ctrl, because I like to use ctrl page up/down to switch tabs.)
Um, is caps lock also a fake-ish key? I’d love to use it to toggle the arrow key functions, but last I looked into it it didn’t look possible.
Nah, capslock is real.
Both real, and real useless. Imho.
I remap my capslock. And I have Left-Alt+capslock set to toggle capslock, in case I actually want it, which I don’t think I’ve ever have.
Numlock and even the rarely present scroll-lock is real too. On the Framework, only Fn and, I believe, airplane mode come to mind as handled in firmware.
Depends \on the vintage of XPS 13. Just because they are ruining their computer doesn’t mean everyone else needs to copy. Except they all do, as if there was a law passed.
Also: “smartphones” are not supposed to have headphone jacks anymore, and certainly nothing so practical as a place to attach a wrist-strap—that would save too many phones from fatal drops and kill a lot of replacement sales.
-kb, the Kent who points out that the stupid new XPS 13 doesn’t have a headphone jack either.
I am using keyd and this is my /etc/keyd/defailt.conf:
[ids]
* # not clear what this does, something about defaulting
# in everything normal, not sure it is necessary.
[main]
capslock = toggle(altarrows) # tapping once capslock turns on
# altarrows layer, tapping again turns
# off the layer.
[altarrows] # defines that layer, remaps the following keys
up = pageup
down = pagedown
left = home
right = end
[global]
layer_indicator = 1 # makes any layer light the capslock LED, because
# all the meta keys start out as layers, this
# means all the meta keys will light the LED
# while held down, but also the capslock toggle
# itself, because it is triggering a layer,
# making the capslock toggle its LED per normal,
# except it will no longer work as a capslock
The caps lock now controls whether the arrow keys are arrwo keys or are page up, down, home, and end. And if I am not touching the keyboard, the LED shows whether I am in that alternate mode. If I am holding some meta key (shift, ctrl, alt, etc.) the capslock LED will also light, as I hold it. Okay.
This remapping of the keyboard does mean I no longer have a caps lock that produces capital letters, but that isn’t so useful a feature, so…so what?
Thanks for everyone’s help! (Um, how do I mark this as solved? And it looks like it is now marked as solved. Because I used the word “SOLVED”?)
I was notified due to the reply to my post, and I added it to the thread title for you. Only users with a Trust Level 3+ can edit titles on threads they themselves didn’t originally create.
