No Stupid Questions

I haven't used numlock in years but I remember that for certain games that you played with the arrow keys, I preferred to use the arrows on the numpad instead of the dedicated ones.

And according to Wikipedia, the reason why numlock exists in the first place is the fact that certain keyboards didn't have dedicated arrow keys, but did have a numpad. I guess numlock on full-sized keyboards is just a relic that keyboard manufacturers are schlepping around because it's cheap enough to produce and doesn't really hurt 🤷

I can be useful. If NumLock is turned off you can use 2, 4, 6, and 8 as arrow keys for example. Although with most modern programs you can easily rebind keys so it's more a thing of the past, like the "Pause" button.

I have a smaller keyboard that doesn't have dedicated arrow keys, or any of the home, page up, etc. They're all on the numpad, so numlock for me is very useful.

It's a relic of the past. Old keyboards didn't have dedicated arrow keys and since many programs were only controlled by arrow keys rather than a mouse, having a num lock key was a good solution to the problem. But if you are still stuck in an environment where you have to navigate a lot with arrow keys, the num lock still comes in handy. Having Pg Up and Down and the Home/End keys nearby is super handy in this situation.

It's still useful for some old video games, especially for multiplayer where both play at the same time.

There's an old game I grew up with called Castle of the Winds. You could also move using some other keys or the mouse, but for me my favorite way by far was using the numpad with numlock turned off.

I also used to use the numpad while playing Half-Life, as the person who introduced me to that game swore by remapping all the keys to the numpad.

I have literally removed the NumLock keycap from all of my keyboards to make sure I don't accidentally turn it off. Never missed it.

I have also removed the F1 keycap. Never use it.

I can't even remember when I would've needed the arrow keys on the numpad.

My keyboard has also SysRq, Scroll lock and Pause/Break keys on top of the numpad, never needed any of them.

How am I going to make an auto clicker then? With 5 and + held at the same time it keeps clicking really fast.

I actually have a collegaue who uses the numeric keys as arrows and shit, he uses the NumLock pretty regularly.

He is the only one I actually know who does that, tho.

It's useful if you enable Mouse Keys mode. Which is useful if you find yourself without a working mouse for one reason or another.

Yes, there are arrows on the numeric keyboard which can be used for various reasons, also home and end buttons.

For a full size, 104-key PC keyboard, everything that is mapped to the numpad is also somewhere else, and the keys are spaced out enough that you'd almost never need to turn off the numpad, so the key is just there for oddball legacy apps that do weird stuff. It was more important before IBM released the fully "modern" 101-key Model M.

For laptop keyboards and other reduced format keyboards that still include all or part of a numpad, it can still be useful. I actually use autohotkeys instead, but one of my budget mechanical keyboards only has the arrow nav keys and the rest are accessed by turning off NumLock.

no use whatsoever. this is an artifact from the days when the arrows, etc. did not exist as separate keys.

I only find it useful on laptop keyboards. I like the numpad for entering numbers, and I also like having dedicated keys for stuff like Home, End, and Insert when browsing or editing. It saves space when you can double the numpad for both.

I think the numlock key is a hangover from the IBM XT computers (maybe even before that). Those keyboards didn't have the cursor keys and other key block. So, the numlock key was quite important.

I know, because I got my first PC during the PC AT days right before they moved toward ATX. That was a full size keyboard.

I am surprised it has stuck around so long. I understand in the transition from XT to AT that perhaps computer operators got used to using the numpad for navigation and muscle memory would be ruined. But, you know it's like 40 years on now. There isn't really a modern day reason to keep it.

But, happy to be proven wrong.

think of it more like a switch that makes that part of your keyboard multi-use.

You can buy keyboards that cut off that entire section if you don't use it.

Yes. On my keyboard there's no separate "end" key, it's part of 3 on the numpad, that key is very useful when using the terminal, because you don't need to wait for 5 years for the cursor to make it to the end of your command.

An easy indicator to see if a computer is on / wake it up / see if the keyboard is connected / see if a PC has crashed.

Never used it, really inconvenient. Stays off here and now you gave me an idea to rebind to something useful.

If you need to type numbers really fast, of course there’s no beating numlock. 10 key for the win. Of course that doesn’t get at why not just leave it as 10 key forever and skip the arrows. I know a lot of older programs… like msdos older…required the use of the arrow keys. And some people do prefer it for their cursor, and it doesn’t hurt to provide the option.

I think it is still is useful, as some software still hasn't figured out how to turn on numlock automatically, and for a few applications number pad scrolling can be better than the arrow keys, but it is probably less useful than the scroll lock key at this point.

You can use ahk to force NumLock btw

10-key. Pretty useful for my job as a bookkeeper.