What good is the Scroll Lock key?

I haven't seen any use for it lately? Anyone have any examples?

jasonh

Posted 2009-07-16T02:34:33.587

Reputation: 2 967

bah, I can't read. I initially read that as "CAPS lock key..." D'oh... – Brian Postow – 2010-08-03T15:56:38.473

Why do modern keyboards have Scroll Lock? – phuclv – 2018-01-31T04:26:47.337

Lots of duplicates http://superuser.com/search?q=scroll+lock

– Chris Nava – 2009-12-07T04:45:26.857

Answers

It's more of a vestige from the IBM PC Keyboard. Wikipedia has a nice history on it.

Sampson

Posted 2009-07-16T02:34:33.587

Reputation: 7 244

Bah, you beat me to it. – TheTXI – 2009-07-16T02:36:53.817

1Hehe. It was close :) You're too busy moderatin' to keep up. hehe. Thanks for the up-vote. – Sampson – 2009-07-16T02:37:47.640

1+1: decent answer, I could have not have said it better... – RSolberg – 2009-07-16T02:44:22.480

@RSolberg, yes you could, don't be so modest. Hehe. – Sampson – 2009-07-16T09:46:32.967

Very useful in applications like Excel sometimes, when you want to keep the cursor in a big table in its place while looking around for something.

Has other uses, but since I'm doing in excel at the present this first sprang to mind.

Rook

Posted 2009-07-16T02:34:33.587

Reputation: 21 622

The Straight Dope has a good summary:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2125/whats-the-scroll-lock-key-on-my-computer-for

The Scroll Lock key has appeared on the keyboards of IBM personal computers since the original 83-key PC/XT and the 84-key AT layouts, and remains on the 101-key and greater "enhanced" keyboards currently in use. The Scroll Lock key wasn't on the original Macintosh keyboards but appears on the Mac's "enhanced" keyboard.

The main intent of the Scroll Lock key was to allow scrolling of screen text up, down and presumably sideways using the arrow keys in the days before large displays and graphical scroll bars. You can see where this might have been handy in the DOS era, when screen output typically was limited to 80 characters wide by 25 rows deep. For some types of programs, spreadsheets being the obvious example, it's still handy now. In Microsoft Excel, Scroll Lock allows you to scroll a spreadsheet with the arrow keys without moving the active cell pointer from the currently highlighted cell. In Quattro Pro, another spreadsheet program, Scroll Lock works in a similar manner, although in contrast to Excel it's not possible to scroll the active cell pointer completely off the screen.

Jeff Atwood

Posted 2009-07-16T02:34:33.587

Reputation: 22 108

I have a bunch of KVMs that use Scroll-Lock, Scroll-Lock as an "attention" sequence.

David Mackintosh

Posted 2009-07-16T02:34:33.587

Reputation: 3 728

It's nice to have a few spare keys around for custom actions :)

I use scroll lock all the time to switch keyboard layouts (thanks IBM!).

Ian Mackinnon

Posted 2009-07-16T02:34:33.587

Reputation: 3 919

In the FreeBSD console, it stops the screen from scrolling, and allows you to page back through the buffer.

coneslayer

Posted 2009-07-16T02:34:33.587

Reputation: 7 494

Linux does this as well. – new123456 – 2011-03-16T00:26:43.173

Ctrl+Scroll Lock removes annoying message "No files were found to look in. Find was stopped in progress." in Visual Studio. So 'Scroll Lock' is the best key on my keyboard.

Kirill V. Lyadvinsky

Posted 2009-07-16T02:34:33.587

Reputation: 5 028

I use scroll lock when searching through large spreadsheets, I can move around in the spreadsheet without losing my place.

seray

Posted 2009-07-16T02:34:33.587

Reputation: 1

Auto-run in World of Warcraft and many other MMOG's.

Eric Muyser

Posted 2009-07-16T02:34:33.587

Reputation: 211

1Actually the default for Auto-run in WoW is NumLock :) – Traxex1909 – 2013-12-16T10:32:40.047