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Comment by jorams | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what terminal that is, because the Home and End keys, which I'm pretty sure are the expected alternatives, work fine in every terminal for me on Linux.

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There are many keyboards without home and end keys.

I feel like you're being willfully obtuse here. I can't remember the last time I used a laptop which had Home / End keys.

Edit: actually I do remember -- it was an HP ProBook from 2011.

For the complaint to make any sense in the first place there needs to be an expected alternative way to go back to the beginning and end of a line. Otherwise it would be "it took me maybe 15 years to get used to being able to go to the beginning or end of a line in one keystroke". The two such options I'm aware of are Home/End (on macbooks I believe that is Fn+arrow keys) and Ctrl-a/Ctrl-e.

What alternative key combinations do you expect to work for the purpose?

I think I didn't communicate that well. What I saw was:

    jvns: I didn't know you could go to the beginning of the line
    you: But you could have just pressed the Home key

The obvious answer is: jvns doesn't have a Home key.

Almost every (Windows) laptop has them, although they do all use their own unique (IMHO often awkward) layout.

I can't remember the last time I used a laptop without Home/End keys.

Among them are a Dell from 2002, an IBM from 2006, another Dell from 2018, and a Lenovo from 2019.

...and here's one from 2024 that still does: https://www.storagereview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Sto...

I have the same experience.

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