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.
-kb
Then without an external keyboard it’s a two key press. Not ideal as you say.
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.
I’m coming from an XPS 13 and the page up/down keys are in the same place (non dedicated keys) as my new framework 13. 
Hi and welcome to the forum
The issue is that the page up and page down require using the [shift] key else it’s just scroll up and down.
And this is not what the OP wants
But yes it looks the same on the XPS 13
Does that actually work?
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.
-kb
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.
Things are changing ??
and more crazy stuff ???
But can you lock them to pgup/pgdn?
I’m sure I did a while ago but not at the moment ??
I’d love details on how to do that…
-kb
Oh, you’re on Linux? Nice.
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.
Thanks,
-kb
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.
SOLVED
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”?)
-kb
If you have the option to edit the title, then a pencil icon shows next to the title which you can click.
Clicking the pencil will bring up these edit options.
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.
Ah! That explains it.
-kb
Correction: The comments I added broke it. Seems comments have to begin in first column.
-kb
