Is there use for the Scroll Lock button anymore?

Question

The scroll lock button seems to be a reminder of the good old green terminal days. Does anyone still use it? Should the 101 button keyboard become the 100 button keyboard?

Answer 1

In Excel, if you turn on scroll lock, using the arrow keys scrolls the spread sheet instead of changing the cell the cursor is in.

Answer 2

Microsoft Excel uses Scroll Lock to allow you to scroll the spreadsheet around with the arrow keys without changing the active/selected cell -- in line with the Scroll Lock key's original intent.

Answer 3

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.

Other programs use Scroll Lock for special functions.

Answer 4

It looks mostly dead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_lock

I don't remember the last time I used it...

Answer 5

In many KVM situations, double-hitting scroll lock with bring up the machine selection screen.

Answer 6

If you happen to have some legacy MS-DOS games around, it might be useful ;-)

Answer 7

Well, that's yet another key to be used with AutoHotkey... (or other keyboard shortcut managers).

Answer 8

I use it all the time on Unix terminals. It is quite handy when something catches my eye when I'm tailing a log file.

Answer 9

One of the visualization plugins for Winamp (A media player) uses scroll lock to prevent the visualization from rotating visualizations every x seconds

Answer 10

Since it is connected to the LED, some clever folks have added code to make it flash (e.g. scroll lock on/off/on/off) at a given interval as a notification for new email messages (or similar)

This can be "cool" if you have a laptop, that is closed (or the screen is sleeping)... you just see if the light is blinking.

Answer 11

In Synergy you can lock your mouse to the current screen. Very helpful when you want to share a mouse with a PC on the other side of the room.

Answer 12

Scroll lock (at least the LED for it, anyways) is used along with the caps lock and num lock LED's to provide diagnostic error codes when troubleshooting hardware issues on Dell laptops. This is quite useful when troubleshooting display problems that might prevent diagnostic messages from being read off the screen.

Answer 13

I use it all the time, with the purpose for which it was made. For a variety of things.