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Comment by Mosteran | Hacker News Reader

Does the Sysrq key do anything else besides this? It doesn't make sense for everybody to have it on their keyboards just to serve low-level developers. The same goes for scroll lock and to some extent pause. A lot of keyboards combine these together and make them hard to find but they're still there for every computer user on the planet to look at and read while they're trying to find a key they actually want.

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Well, at least in my Spanish keyboard there are two functions for the SysRq key, as the keycap says:

Impr. Pant. | Pet. Sis. -- which is expanded to --> Imprimir Pantalla | Petición a Sistema -- which translates to --> Prnt Scr | SysRq

So that binding makes the key actually useful for everyday activities.

Yes, the key is the same on English keyboards too. I've no idea about USB keyboards, but on AT keyboards that key actually generates two separate scan codes depending on whether it's pressed without alt (PrtSc) or with (SysRq). So in a sense SysRq is genuinely a separate key, that just shares its button with another.

(I don't remember what happens to the Alt key press when you use it to invoke SysRq - I suppose it just appears as normal and so the Alt+SysRq combination sort of doesn't exist.)

Interestingly the SysRq scan code is far easier to detect - there's just one value to watch for rather than (as with PrtSc) a whole sequence of them. Probably a legacy of its having its own key on older keyboards.

Sure the key is useful as print screen, but the words "Pet. Sis." aren't. My dissatisfaction is that people have to repeatedly read that, think about it, and decide it's not what they want. Good to hear smaller computers now are getting rid of it.

Even better, without Sys Rq, that 2nd function could be allocated to some other obscure thing, reducing the number of keys.

Scroll Lock is handy for at least people who are power users of Excel. If you "turn on" scroll lock,you can move the active sheet around without changing the current/active cell.

For Pause, it's useful in Visual Studio to interrupt the current build.

> It doesn't make sense for everybody to have it on their keyboards just to serve low-level developers.

It did in 1984: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_request

it's not on many modern at least, smaller form factor, laptop keyboards. Chromebooks, lenovo x230/240, hp stream 11, carbon x1...

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