Possibly the most useless key ever. WaltMossberg is among those who want to get rid of it completely. What is it used for? Was it ever really used for anything?
There are actually a few programs that make use of the Scroll Lock key:
- MESS (http://mess.emuverse.com/) -- uses it to enable/disable keys that control the emulation, for computers that have their own uses for the F1 key.
- Microsoft Agent uses it as a push-to-talk button.
- Some UNIX systems use it to enable hardware scrollback on text consoles (temporarily suspending text output).
- Microsoft Excel uses it to, um, lock scrolling. Go figure, eh.
- A lot of UNIX users remapped the key to something more useful. Before keyboards with windows keys were wide spread, defining ScrollLock as the CompositeKey was quite usual.
The Scroll Lock light could conceivably be used as some other kind of status indicator.
Not nearly as annoying as CapsLock.