On my old Dell xps 14 laptop, the function button was close to the arrow keys, making it very convenient to use one-handed. I actually preferred it to a separate home button, because, in a text box, I often want to jump to the start/end of a line and then move a word or two inward -- do-able using control+arrows. It was almost as good as vim, although of course I had to take my hand off the home row.
Home and end are most useful for me when I'm writing or programming, so both of my hands are on the keyboard anyway. I think I actually find these key combos more useful than a dedicated home or end button, as I'd have to move my hands a lot further for those.
It does for me. I've always used ⌘+up and ⌘+down to go to the top and bottom of the page. After eight years of using Macs, I didn't even know you could use the function key as suggested above.
Yeah, unless the doc is dozens+ pages long. Say, a book on a single page. Then it’s real nice to have a key sequence to get around. Going to the start or end of a long document is an infrequent enough operation I think a two hand sequence is fine.
Hm, that would indeed be an alternative. I never tried hooking up a (windows-) keyboard to a mac, but don't see why it shouldn't work. Question is if the software or editors support the key layout.
And, of course, you can always mess with key bindings for a user by creating a file at ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict with custom overrides for whatever.
I have Home & End on my keyboard, but they are not very conveniently located. Mapping <Super>-A and <Super>-E to Home and End is much more ergonomic (or you can use other modifier like <Ctrl> or <Alt>). Not sure though which keys should be mapped to PageUp/PageDown. Those are not terribly useful keys anyway if you use touchpad or Space.
Also, use Up Arrow to go to the beginning of the line and Down Arrow to go to the end of the line on single line text boxes (I use it often on browser address bars).
My home Apple keyboard has the Home button between Help and Page Up. Though, I will admit that keyboard is 2003ish. But I keep using it because it still has good action.
Is that one of the A1048 [1] "crumb tray" keyboards with the clear rim around the edge? I recently switched to one of those from an original iMac keyboard (finally got fed up with not having a forward delete key) and the key edges and the action both feel crisper. Could just be that I've been using the other one for a decade or so though.
