Just after I wrote my last post, I saw this one on 37signals about the Home and End keys which makes a similar point.
The more I watch people use computers the more I start to think that “Home” and “End” should be bigger, given new positions on the keyboard, or renamed “Top” and “Bottom”.
Yes, rename them ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ – that’s what they do. Or make the home key take you to your website home page and the end key … I don’t know … perhaps it should autho-euthenise your computer or programs with bad user interfaces.
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You *do* use a word processor of some sort, don’t you Matthew? “Home” and “End” most certainly do NOT take you to the top and bottom of a document in that context. And I would scream bloody murder if anyone made them do that.
I always use Home and End to go to the beginning and end of a line of text, and not just in Word or OO.org. Plenty of text editing apps (and text-entry fields like the one I’m currently typing in) do the same thing. Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End go to the top and bottom.
I think it was the designers of web browsers that wacked things out by making those keys do the top/bottom thing.
Please, I’m begging you as a devoted user of keyboard shortcuts: DON’T MESS WITH MY HOME/END KEYS!
As Roy pointed out ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ are definitely the wrong names for these keys. ‘end’ is fine as it is, but I think there is a case for renaming ‘home’ to ‘start’
Also the ‘Delete’ should be moved somewhere well away from these keys. Thank god for ‘Ctrl+Z’ is all I can say!