I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys

The pointer represents your (pointer) finger. Single-finger motions affect the pointer. Scrolling motions affect a representation of the document. When I move my (real) finger up, my (real) finger moves up. When I put my (real) finger on a (real) document and move it up, the paper of the document moves up, causing new text from the bottom to appear in my field of view.

"I've always hated stateful control. Always ripped out caps lock key from my boards (or later figured out remapping), same for insert mode"

You want some real fun, try the Microsoft Surface keyboard. Maybe they've fixed in a very recent version, but given how long the product line has had this problem, probably not. It has a stateful Fn key. That's right, a Fn key that works like capslock. There is no conceivable way this is a good idea. It means that if you actually want to use both "sides" of the Fn'd keys, you literally can not build muscle memory. If you hold the Fn key and press one of those keys, it'll do the "other" function, but if you just tap the Fn key, including because you had meant to press one of the keys but decided not to halfway through (which happens all the time, you just don't normally notice it because it's a completely normal thing to do that normally carries no consequences), you flip the polarity of the entire Fn key set. Now a normal press and a Fn-press do the opposite things. Until you flip it again.

This is not a "oh, as a multi-decade key user I have opinions about whether key strokes should be 68dB or 72dB" question. This is basic functioning of the keyboard. It's insane.

And, naturally, the key is "magic" and the OS can't see it. While I'm bitching, what is the deal with keyboards on new laptops needing special drivers? What the fuck is so special about your keyboard that you need drivers for it? I'll tell you what's so special about it: stuff you shouldn't be doing anyhow. My OS should be able to see and address all keys so I can remap them as needed. Your stupid special key that does your stupid special thing doesn't need to be a stupid special key. Make it a normal key and trigger your behavior in Windows, not in the hardware. Then I can use your stupid special key at least as a Meta or a Hyper or something. You don't need special drivers to have normal keys, you only need special drivers if you're doing something stupid.

So there's no fixing the Fn key on these systems because it's one of the magic keys that can't be seen by the OS at all, so it can't be remapped, it can't be turned off, it can't be locked into one state, you can't do anything. You're just stuck with a keyboard that, from your brain's point of view, randomly swaps a couple of dozen keys around.

Now I'm also on a programmable keyboard. This guy, to be precise: https://mistelkeyboard.com/products/0a26d32ac1e3b1d2af2896e0... which I split across my chair so I've got one half under each hand when it is resting comfortably. That's something you can't get a laptop keyboard to do.

The caps lock key is good for binding to F13 and using for push-to-talk. I know some people bind it to escape for Vim usage but I don't like that because I'm likely to also use Vim on machines without that key remapped and that messes with muscle memory.

Something that I'm missing from both the article and the comments - I would remap the sleep button to F4 at OS level. Repeat analogous steps for other keys.

Granted, you'll lose these functions, and likely switching to another keyboard will drive you mad, but I guess this is a good stopgap software based solution.

I don't like that aspect of emacs, but if you are a heavy-duty editor user it becomes difficult to arrange a consistent set of emacs shortcuts that aren't modal that don't conflict with anything else, because there's so many things you might want to do and so many pre-existing keyboard shortcuts that you can conflict with, not just in emacs but in your window manager. As a simple for-instance, I've got four or five keyboard shortcuts I added in the last year for dealing with the Claude windows in emacs that I've been using (the package defines a couple dozen, it's just about five I use a lot), and I didn't even try to figure out how to make them anything other than "C-c c $something" because it's hard to find somewhere they can go in any sort of pattern that makes any sense and doesn't conflict with anything. Fortunately most Unix window managers seem to leave the Windows key alone, but of course if I try to bring that to Windows it would fail miserably.

I did remap my heaviest hitters a long time ago to single strokes, though. Most notably, start macro, end macro, and replay macro all got coveted non-modal shortcuts.