Aside from gaming or specialty keyboards with unique features, you know what to expect when you buy a keyboard or a laptop. While designs differ, keyboards are mature enough now that the keys included are consistent.
This makes you wonder why our keyboards still include keys that few people use these days. From the pointless to the annoying, several keyboard keys have outlived their usefulness and should give way to modern, more useful keys.
I’m focusing on keys common to all keyboards. I didn’t mention less common keys found on specific devices, like those to turn off the touchpad on certain laptops.
Change the arrow keys’ behavior… or not
All three “lock” keys are arguably unnecessary, with Scroll Lock being the easiest to justify. Though it might appear to do nothing, it does have a function: it switches the arrow keys between changing the current selection and scrolling the screen.
Decades ago, scrolling the contents of a program’s window wasn’t as easy as it is now, especially before scroll wheels were added to mice in the mid-1990s. That’s why Scroll Lock exists: instead of using the arrow keys to move the text cursor in a command line terminal, you could use them to scroll the whole screen much faster.
Nowadays, spreadsheet apps are the only major category of programs that preserve this behavior—though not all do. Excel and LibreOffice Calc support Scroll Lock, while Google Sheets and OnlyOffice don’t. Unless you are a hardcore spreadsheet user, this key is a waste of space (and puts a potentially distracting light on your keyboard).
Pause/Break
Take a breather?
You’ve likely wondered what this key is for after pressing it and not seeing anything pause. While this key has a few more uses than Scroll Lock, they’re not relevant for most people.
“Break” is leftover terminology from telegraphs, where breaking the circuit was a way for a receiver to interrupt a sender to let them know the receiver needed to send a message.
In the few places this key still has a purpose, it fulfills its name. It pauses the BIOS text that appears when you boot your PC—if you’re fast enough to catch that on a modern computer. This is more applicable to older, slower systems.
When you run a command in the Command Prompt or PowerShell, hitting Pause/Break will freeze the screen’s output until you hit another key. This lets you catch up with something that spits out a lot of results.
Screenshot by Ben Stegner; no attribution required
As you’d expect from the name, this key will pause some games, though Esc is a much more common method for pausing modern PC games. Development tools like Visual Studio also support Pause/Break for debugging or stopping a build.
Those are all suitable enough uses, but unless you’re a developer or heavy command line user, the key doesn’t have much use. Its best trick is a shortcut: Win + Pause/Break opens the System > About menu in the Windows Settings app. That saves a few clicks when you need to see how much RAM you have or what version of Windows you’re running.
Insert
…or delete what you already typed
Screenshot by Ben Stegner; no attribution required
Insert is one of the most annoying keys to hit by mistake. It toggles between two modes: insert and overtype. Insert is what you’re used to and likely prefer, where typing puts those characters in front of anything at your cursor’s current position. Overtype mode replaces anything at your cursor’s position with new text, making it easy to delete words you wanted to keep.
There’s no visual signal for which mode you’re in, and many programs don’t support overtype mode. This makes it easy for the key to cause trouble when you aren’t expecting it.
Someone must prefer overtype mode; I don’t. It would be more sensible to remove this key to make room for something more common, while allowing you to change this behavior with a keyboard shortcut or setting toggle.
Num Lock
Why wouldn’t you want the numbers?
by Gavin
If your keyboard has a number pad, you presumably wanted it for quickly entering digits. But by bumping Num Lock and disabling this, the pad will be used for functions instead.
On most number pads, the 8, 4, 6, and 2 keys function as arrows, while 7 and 1 function as Home and End. The 9 and 6 keys function as Page Up and Page Down, with 0 being another Insert key and the period serving as a duplicate Delete key.
These are seldom useful; the normal versions of all those keys are closer while normally typing, and in reach while using the number pad. I suppose you could quickly toggle Num Lock on and off to whiz around spreadsheets, but for most people, always using it for numbers is simpler.
For mouse emergencies only
Gavin Phillips/MakeUseOfCredit: Gavin Phillips/MakeUseOf
The Menu key is another relic. It’s usually next to the right Windows key, and looks like a dropdown menu or simple document. It performs the same action as a right-click of the mouse: opening context menus with more options.
This can prove helpful for accessibility reasons, or in an emergency if your mouse stops working. But given how infrequently you right-click, and that the shortcut Shift + F10 performs the same action, it’s not that important.
Newer “Copilot+ PCs” swap this key out for a Copilot key, which is a dedicated way to summon the AI assistant. But since any Windows 11 computer supports Win + C to open Copilot, this isn’t terribly useful either.
Caps Lock
CAN YOU HEAR ME?
Jowi Morales / MakeUseOf
Credit: Jowi Morales / MakeUseOf
Lastly, we have everyone’s favorite key to hit by mistake. Caps Lock is infamous for silently messing up passwords and making your message look like you’re shouting. While you might enable it intentionally when formatting a document or chart, it certainly creates more problems than it solves.
Like many aspects of modern keyboards, Caps Lock has its roots in typewriters. Typewriters had Shift keys that allowed you to type capital letters, but holding that heavy key with your little finger for an extended period wasn’t comfortable. With the Shift lock switch, the typewriter would keep Shift held down for you.
This made sense at the time, especially since all-caps typing was an easy way to differentiate text before word processors made it easy to set different colors, italics, and other formatting. Many industries still use all-caps for certain terms, but otherwise, you likely activate it only by mistake.
The biggest issue with Caps Lock is that it wastes a vital space on the keyboard (right on the home row) for something we barely use. If it were in the spot where Scroll Lock is, and something more useful like Delete were in its place, it wouldn’t be as obnoxious.
Notably, Google removed the Caps Lock keys on Chromebooks in favor of a Search key to open the app launcher or search Google. It functions as a Caps Lock key when combined with another modifier key, preserving the functionality while making it harder to hit by mistake.
If you ever type a lot of text with Caps Lock enabled by mistake, use the site Convert Case to quickly change it back to sentence case.
Remapping keys is a smart idea
Take back those you never use
Screenshot by Pankil Shah — No attribution required
Thankfully, you aren’t stuck with useless keys you have no purpose for. It’s easy to remap keys to swap one for another, or even assign shortcuts to them.
The easiest way is to remap keys using the Keyboard Manager utility inside PowerToys. This makes it easy to both remap and assign shortcuts to keys, then keep track of them later. You can even limit certain shortcuts to specific apps.
Consider swapping Ctrl and Caps Lock to make that common modifier key easier to hit. You could change Insert to a dedicated search key, mute button for video calls, or similar. Think about the shortcuts you use most or that are hardest to reach, and reassign them to make them more comfortable to use.
Each keyboard key once had a reason to be present, but many of these reasons are no longer relevant. It’s fun to learn about why these useless keys are still around, but even better to make tweaks so you don’t have to waste valuable keyboard space on them anymore.
