alt Hacker NewsThe F1-F12 keys have always felt like one of those things where… it’s like, people who enjoy oldschool interfaces seem very attached to. And I love the terminal, so I feel like I ought to have strong opinions in their favor.
But the only time I need to use them is… what is it, ctrl-alt-F3 to switch to a console if my window manager has fallen apart. This is a very rare event, so I can’t find any strong feeling here.
What do people use these keys for? The volume/brightness keys seem much more useful. Maybe I’ll map the corresponding F-keys to brightness as well, so I can just never care about Fn.
Replies
Alt-F4 is the canonical shortcut for closing a window
F2 is the canonical key for renaming
F5 is refresh
F11 is fullscreen
F1 is for help but admittedly I don't use that a lot
I can't think of a very frequent, standard use for the other keys. So I can't really disagree with having so many F keys being kinda unnecessary. But I'm happy to have them and they never bothered me.
Games often bind skills or other game mechanics to the function keys.
Anecdotally, I switched from `ctrl+shift+i` to F12 for opening the web inspector due to many websites capturing that keybinding for their own purpose (claude and code editors) if I didn't have a function row I'd have to find an even more arcane hotkey.
They're just a nice set of purpose-undefined keys that you or the application can bind to useful functions.
When you have decades of experience with an operating system and/or applications historically respecting keyboard workflows you'll develop strong opinions. You will have an extreme reaction when hardware and software disrespect your investment in your muscle memory.
Shortcuts, mostly.
The shortcut for toggling fullscreen in Firefox is F11.
Many default shortcuts in JetBrains IDEs also use function keys. The keymap can be changed, of course, so you can design your own keymap to avoid F keys, but that's still a bit of a chore.
Same on a Mac: I've never used a function key in the last … 15 years or so? Where the author uses Alt-F4, I use ⌘W. I didn't even hate the Touch Bar (but not exactly used it either.)
I guess you never use Excel, or never learned to use it effectively.
In addition to sibling replies, function keys are very useful in debuggers (to step in/over, set breakpoints, ...). And lots of other things that don't immediately come to mind.
I'm old enough to remember WordPerfect on DOS, with a paper template to put over the function keys on your keyboard as a little cheat sheet for all their functions.