Poll: Most useless key on your keyboard

[Valiance]

Everyone saying "pause-break" needs to hit Win+Pause-Break at least once.

I'm gonna go with... This one:

Spoiler

It changes the brightness of the keys, but only on a three-way toggle of "off" "not bright enough" and "as bright as it gets"

I always leave it on the latter of the options, so, no need for the key for me.

Other than "Delete" and "print screen" ive never willingly used any of that patch of buttons above the arrow keys.

My keyboard has Keys labeled "G1, G2, G3 etc." I think they can be set for certain macros but I've never used them. Same goes for the M1 M2 M3 at the top which i think changes the keys to some sort of custom configuration? I dunno both those things were boasted as features on the box but i never thought id use them so I didnt read into them too far

You don't know what you're missing, friend.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Insert has pissed me off 100 times over. No, I don't want all the text in front of where I edited to suddenly disappear as I type further. GEE, THANKS! =3=

 

[Ftaghn To You Too]

S.

NEVER RETREAT. NEVER.

Actual answer: Pause Break. Does it even do anything? In any program?

 

[Sampler]

Caps lock - has it's uses, albeit infrequent
Scroll lock - again, sporadic use in Excel
Num lock - useful on small keyboards that don't have individual buttons for what's replicated
Pause/break - combined with the windows flag key is a quick and easy way to get to system properties
Insert - infrequent use for when you want to switch to overwrite
Page up/down - take these off and I will cut you, easiest way to navigate
Home/end - how can these even make the list? Annoy the hell out me keyboards that omit these (I'm looking at you laptops)

You may guess from the above I prefer the keyboard over the mouse, generally from the good ol' days before mice (basic on the BBCB, Dos or even linux to a large degree today).

However, there is one key that can go - one key who's sole use to this day mystifies me

Alt Gr

I mean, Alt's largely pointless (ctrl+alt+delete at login, ctrl+shift+escape's a quicker way to taskmanager when in windows) with the exception of accessing alternative characters without bringing up the char map I don't think I really use Alt, but Alt Gr's even worse as it doesn't even do that!

It's only redeeming feature is you can use it instead of Alt when logging in (and therefore with one hand) but otherwise, seriously, what's the point?

 

[Phuctifyno]

The letter C.

K and S will konveniently suffise, thank you very mutsh.

 

[AetherWolf]

My laptop's keyboard has, among other things, a button with a little swirl on it that serves no purpose as far as I know, a button with a mail letter that also serves no purpose, and a print button that is right next to the left shift key that ends up getting pressed accidentally very often. It didn't even have the decency to include a numerical pad or anything. On the plus side, there's no scroll lock key. So there's that.

 

[RevRaptor]

The windows key. It wouldn't be so bad if the little bastard was placed somewhere out of the way but some Muppet decided to place it right between ctrl and alt.

what were they thinking:

Hey I see gamers need to mash the ctrl an alt keys a lot during gaming, I think we should totally place a key between them that kicks them out to desktop, they'll F*&^en love that - genius

 

[Evil Smurf]

The backspace key. Because I don't make mistakes. EVER.

I on the other hand need a time travel key, so I can fight the ninjas at their own game.

 

[maxben]

I would have voted for Pause/Break but my current keyboard doesn't have that (and I only JUST noticed thanks to this thread). Back in the late '80s and early '90s, that key was quite useful when software went wonky.

Seeing as I don't have the aforementioned key, I'm voting "other." The winner is?

Except that that key is SO useless that many video games use it to bring up the console. So I've actually used it quite a bit for that purpose.

 

[MorganL4]

I answered "scroll lock" in the poll, but then I looked at my keyboard and the scroll lock key is actually also the F12 key on here, with scroll lock being a function of F12, so I guess the answer is "Pause Break" because for some reason that gets a key of its own.

"Pause break" is actually still useful if you do any kind of script writing or programming, other than that I don't know about its uses, I have only ever needed it for script writing, and a few batch files. But then, I'm an IT geek so yeah, I'm not the normal person. I chose scroll lock just because I tend to use the mouse for that if I need.

 

[Bestival]

I've never actually used the |\ key next to my left shift, the exact same key is next to the enter button and I always use that one when I need either of those symbols. Only thing the one on the left does is occasionally fuck me over when I'm gaming and need to hit shift in a hurry.
Not only is it not used, it willfully and maliciously obstructs me. That is my most useless button.

 

[Mimic]

I've used the Home and End keys from time to time to get to the top or bottom of a long page of text. I've never realy used Scroll lock or Pause Break so wasn't really aware of what they did until now. But my vote is going to go to Insert for the grief it gave me when I was writing essays back in school and didn't realise I had hit that key and my text was eating itself. I've never used it but accidently so it's worse than useless to me.

 

[Yuno Gasai]

On my home keyboard, "Insert". I literally never use it.

At work, I'd have to opt for the "Function" key. Not because it's useless, moreso because of the placement. It's exactly where you expect "Control" to be, which is massively annoying when you're trying to copy-paste things and wonder why you're typing C's and V's everywhere...

 

[not_you]

I put scroll lock...
I like to call myself computer nerd and would know my way around one rather well... But I never even learnt what that key did...

 

[Odbarc]

I agree; caps lock doesn't really do anything you couldn't already do by just perpetually pushing Shift.

Perpetually pushing shift?

Do you mean to say "holding"? I hate to think you release the button after each letter is pressed.