I have the same feeling and I use evil-mode in Emacs because of that. It's basically Vim inside of Emacs.
I tried evil-mode for awhile, but it had too many edge cases that behave differently so I went back /shrug
I have my instance set up to enable/disable evil via a keybinding. That way, the edge cases can be handled smoothly. There is also a way to configure evil so that emacs keybindings work while in Insert mode, but not in Normal or Visual mode, if that matters at all.
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…
I've played a lot of games and other than quick save, can't think of any that have used the F-row.
Minecraft uses several. Different cameras, the console, etc.
Instead of using a single menu bar icon “volume control,” I have transferred the lessons of the keyboard to the GUI and placed two buttons in my menu bar: volume down and volume up. I have been using them all the time for about half a year now. The benefits of this approach, to my knowledge and estimation, include: no waiting for a slider to appear; no nested actions; no need to read the current value; each click doe…
What works well for me is a taskbar icon with mouse scrolling (Waybar pulseaudio module on Sway). You see 50% and a speaker icon, hover and scroll up or down to instantly change.
Thinkpad laptops thankfully have a BIOS option to revert the behaviour to normal, where F1-F12 perform their nominal functions. I'd probably pay an extra €50 for a laptop that didn't come with a stupid Fn button at all. Might want to throw some more money at a few more keyboard modifications: my bottom row is Fn CTRL Win Alt Space AltGr PrtSc Ctrl; that PrtSc button clearly has no business being there. Arrows & PgUp/…
My new thinkpad has an interesting mode where if you accidentally hit fn in combination with a non-function key, the firmware reinterprets the key as Ctrl. Fn+C on the keyboard gets sent to your OS as Ctrl+C. It's pretty handy.
> And so, because I don’t want to hold Fn every time I want to press an F-key for its intended purpose, I used the arcane shortcut Fn+Caps to “lock” the keyboard into “standard” mode, where multipurpose F-keys remain multipurpose F-keys unless I hold down the special magic button that transforms them into rarely-used single-purpose special function keys. > But here’s where the problem occurs. If the batteries get cha…
I encounter that from time to time on my old Microsoft ergonomic too, you're not alone and its always confusing!
Sort of. The downside from the 'state' from Caps Lock is you have to keep track of whether it's active or not. Whereas with layers, typically a layer will only be active if you're holding down some kind of "activate layer" key.
Jef Raskin called those "quasimodes" in The Humane Interface (2000) and was in favor of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(user_interface)#Quasimod...
That's an apt term.
Or more to the point: 'mode error' is exactly what the upthread comment is complaining about with the Caps Lock key.
Whereas I cut my teeth on emacs in the early 90's, so modal is what felt awkward. I wouldn't dislike vim's modes so much if it just had one combination insert/append mode that worked like every other editor out there (including a couple other modal editors I've used), but even after adding various hacks to my vimrc to help unify the two modes, I still stumble over the behavior differences in other places. I really li…
Honestly, there are more "modern" editors with even more intuitive flows. Helix being one. I think the ideal editor for me would be something like a mix of Helix's shortcuts with structural regexp like in vis.
I tried Helix for a few weeks and found it to be less efficient overall. Now granted it's hardly fair to compare 3 weeks to 20 years, so maybe with more time I might change my mind. I really missed vim's . key to repeat the last command for example. I think the learning curve for Helix is probably better than Vim, so if you haven't learned vim, it might be worth it. The other challenge though is the ubiquitous nature of vim and vim emulation.
I've switched to programmable ergo keyboards where there's a whole slew of options ( https://precondition.github.io/home-row-mods just covers home row mods) I've always hated stateful control. Always ripped out caps lock key from my boards (or later figured out remapping), same for insert mode That's carried over, even with options like one shot mods, & cutting down to under 40 keys (& playing with 28, yesterday rece…
I wish I could remove the insert key, but unlike the caps-lock that no application rebinds, insert does get rebound. I wish there was an OS level control "pressing insert by accident should not turn on mangle-my-text-mode".
Plenty of games do rebind Caps Lock as a regular key.
Missing the zeroth option in the "doing Fn right" suggestion list: don't use Fn . I have a keyboard here with a handful of extra keys at the top which do all these functions that the author is showing as Fn functions on their keyboard. Isn't that simply the right option? Also on laptops: yes, I want to change the brightness regularly, but also I use the function keys in applications that support them. There's already…
For laptops the primary concern will be space rather than cost. With everyone trying to be as thin as possible there isn't much empty space and a more keys need a larger keyboard which also takes more internal space.