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Forget all the rants about Caps Lock, Num Lock is the most useless key of them all. It's never, ever useful. You don't want to use your numpad as an arrowpad, since the arrows are 1cm away from it. Ever.
There was a time when some keyboards had a numpad but no dedicated arrow keys. They don't exist anymore. You can find keyboards with no numpad but with arrow keys, but not the opposite.
Therefore, Num Lock is useless, and it only serves to aggravate me and, I presume, others. Please note that I do not want to know how to turn Num Lock on at startup, I do not want to know how to tear the key off, I want to disable it so that it stays on all the time and can't be turned off by mistake. Any idea how to do that?
Ideally I'd like to be able to reclaim the key for another use, such as a modifier that allows me to type hex on the numpad.
Additionally I'd love to know how to turn off the equally useless mouse emulation triggered by Shift + Num Lock.
This person begs to differ – flarn2006 – 2016-10-13T22:23:33.740
2There is one case in which laptop manufacturers override regular alpha characters for a number pad but thats a specific usecase. – wag2639 – 2011-04-16T05:12:31.393
And how do you get the nice key cap style in MarkDown? Couldn't find it! – niXar – 2009-11-17T13:23:03.057
It's <kbd></kbd> – John T – 2009-11-17T13:24:16.907
1The <kbd> tag is not a feature of MarkDown! It has been around since HTML 3.2. – eleven81 – 2009-11-17T13:34:58.347
1+1 I admire your passion, it reflects my feelings on CapsLock vs Ctrl. – kmarsh – 2009-11-17T13:57:54.510
low tech solution: lever the key off the keyboard – Rich Seller – 2009-11-17T15:26:43.500
1@rich: I said I didn't want to hear about that, and it doesn't solve the problem, since if for some reason numlock turns off, you can't turn it back on. – niXar – 2009-11-17T17:15:44.903
I'd advise editing out the rant; there are inevitably some uses that your experience doesn't come across, such as uses that Mad Fish pointed out. From the FAQ: Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered! – Kevin M – 2009-11-18T13:48:54.590
@Kevin: and what are those uses? I haven't found one in the last 20 years. – niXar – 2009-12-12T15:19:50.867