Hacker News Reader

Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

The F1-F12 keys have always felt like one of those things where… it’s like, people who enjoy oldschool interfaces seem very attached to. And I love the terminal, so I feel like I ought to have strong opinions in their favor.

But the only time I need to use them is… what is it, ctrl-alt-F3 to switch to a console if my window manager has fallen apart. This is a very rare event, so I can’t find any strong feeling here.

What do people use these keys for? The volume/brightness keys seem much more useful. Maybe I’ll map the corresponding F-keys to brightness as well, so I can just never care about Fn.

View on HN

In addition to sibling replies, function keys are very useful in debuggers (to step in/over, set breakpoints, ...). And lots of other things that don't immediately come to mind.

I'm old enough to remember WordPerfect on DOS, with a paper template to put over the function keys on your keyboard as a little cheat sheet for all their functions.

Yeah, when I’ve had to break down and reach for a debugger, it was gdb. I’m sure there are shortcuts but since it was a rare event, I just typed “step” and “continue” like a caveman, haha.

Games often bind skills or other game mechanics to the function keys.

Anecdotally, I switched from `ctrl+shift+i` to F12 for opening the web inspector due to many websites capturing that keybinding for their own purpose (claude and code editors) if I didn't have a function row I'd have to find an even more arcane hotkey.

They're just a nice set of purpose-undefined keys that you or the application can bind to useful functions.

I've played a lot of games and other than quick save, can't think of any that have used the F-row.

Pretty much required in Eve Online.

MMORPGs and games that have many different mechanics might be more prone to it, versus first-person controlled games? In my experience its pretty common.

Most likely, I haven't played many MMOs. Having to go from WASD to the function row is pretty clumsy for me, especially when there's ~20 extra keys around WASD without having to move a hand.

Minecraft uses several. Different cameras, the console, etc.

Alt-F4 is the canonical shortcut for closing a window

F2 is the canonical key for renaming

F5 is refresh

F11 is fullscreen

F1 is for help but admittedly I don't use that a lot

I can't think of a very frequent, standard use for the other keys. So I can't really disagree with having so many F keys being kinda unnecessary. But I'm happy to have them and they never bothered me.

depends on artillery.. i mean canon:

F5 is for save game

F9 is load :)

F12 is Save As. Yes I have to use MS Office at work.

Shortcuts, mostly.

The shortcut for toggling fullscreen in Firefox is F11.

Many default shortcuts in JetBrains IDEs also use function keys. The keymap can be changed, of course, so you can design your own keymap to avoid F keys, but that's still a bit of a chore.

Same on a Mac: I've never used a function key in the last … 15 years or so? Where the author uses Alt-F4, I use ⌘W. I didn't even hate the Touch Bar (but not exactly used it either.)

VSCode binds a lot of basic commands to function keys, so I'm always doing Fn-F12. That seems like a weird choice, and if it really bothered me, I could remap it, but so far I haven't.

VSCode is a Microsoft product (as is Excel, mentioned elsewhere) and Microsoft products work best on Microsoft platforms.

Mac is not a Microsoft platform though.

F2 to rename files

F4 to open a console window in the current directory from Dolphin

F5 to refresh, or quicksave in games

F9 to quickload

F11 to fullscreen browsers and some other programs

I guess you never use Excel, or never learned to use it effectively.

Your guess is right. My patience for spreadsheets runs out (and I switch to Python or something) before I hit a problem complex enough that effectiveness matters.

No shade! But it's still amazingly effective to know to use F2, F4, F11, F12, etc. Works in LibreOffice as well. F2 to switch to cell edit mode is very useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com