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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

There are dozens of us. It's massively disrupting to the state of flow to miss a key by one, and suddenly another window pops up, but there's no text inside. It takes several seconds for the window to compose itself, and several more to close.

I do keep the F1 key somewhere safe, to put back onto the keyboard, for the next keyboard user.

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I do too. And the scroll lock and num lock too. And I added a sticker to let IT know that the keyboard isn't broken and shouldn't be replaced.

I came here to mention Scroll Lock which normally doesn't do much in Windows applications but I was utterly confused the other day when my Excel started behaving weirdly !

Well, now you know what Scroll Lock is for, heh. :) It's done that in spreadsheets since the early versions of Lotus 1-2-3 for MSDOS.

"If it is slow, it is wrong."

ahhh, can't you just map it to something else? (nothing?)

Excel users don't think that way, I guess. Remapping keys requires a registry update on Windows, which many of my windows-at-work friends don't get access to. Even if they did, they might not trust themselves to make registry updates. Popping the key off is easy, secure, and effective.

A registry key? It’s incredibly you can change keyboard layout but not key bindings easily.

A 2-line autohotkey script would be enough to disable the F1 key in just Excel. You can even compile it down to a single copyable binary.

But your users are all trained not to run random scripts or binaries, right? ...right? ;)

If IT has your computer locked down, it's way easier to just pry the thing off.

Huh, I had no idea Windows has no easy way to remap keys.

What's the downside of not being able to hit F1? Taking the keycap off is simple and effective.

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