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Comment by cellularmitosis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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