Re: [Usability] Print Screen and Pause keys

[hobbit aloss ukuu org uk]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 08:58:54AM -0500 or thereabouts, Sinzui Kobalt wrote:
> Print Screen, Scroll Lock, and Pause keys keys have been dead for more
> than a decade in several operating systems.  It's a shame to have them
> taking up space on the keyboard.  Could they be reused?  Print Screen

They are not dead on my boxes (Linux). Which OSes are you thinking of?

> might be permanently mapped to a screen capture app.  Pause/Break could
> display a task list or process monitor.  May I could map cut/copy/paste
> to them and relabel the caps.

I already use scroll lock. I have a KVM (keyboard,video,mouse) box. 
This is something where instead of having two (or more) computers
each with their own separate monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and no
space, you have one monitor, one mouse, and one keyboard, plugged
into a box, the KVM box.

Then you have a whole array of holes in the back of this box, 
each group marked "machine 1", "machine 2" and so on. And then
you have all the cables for each computer which would normally
go to separate monitors, mice and keyboards plugged into it.

So I have one monitor, one mouse, and one keyboard. And more than
one (three, ahem) computers. And to shift to using a different 
computer, I hit the scroll lock key twice and then a number on 
the keyboard. And a different session to a different computer 
appears on the monitor.

I would not appreciate finding that suddenly it had altered the
volume on the speakers because Gnome had decided to remap them
because no-one uses them. 

Scroll lock is often used by X applications such as xterm-like
programs. To, um, lock the scrolling. 

Break is often used by serial terminal emulators to send a break 
signal to an application.

Print screen -- well, that's used by some apps, but the key is
sometimes also SysRq as well, and I have SysRq enabled in my
kernel for when it crashes and I need debugging output for the
bug report.

(It doesn't often crash, but I bet it will if my sysrq option 
is remapped on me to print a screenshot.)

By the way -- have you ever seen a Sun keyboard? There are
several varieties, but the "Unix" ones have a whole host of 
"extra" keys which PC users probably find unnecessary..

If it's just the waste of space, of course, there's always
the "Happy Hacker" keyboards :) 

Telsa