I recently bough a dell xps 9370, and found that the kwyboard layout varied from previous versions.
Now there are separate Home / End keys at the top of the keyboard.
I'd like to also have the functionality to issue home / end with the combination fn-left for home, and fn-right for end, as in previous versions.
It's really annoying when you are moving around in the text with the arrows keys to have to go al the way up to press home then shift-end to select the whole line.
From what I could research there's no way to emulate it using software. Is there some workaround to this or same place where we can ask for this feature?
Home/End occupy the same physical keys as F11/F12. Also, the far left/right keys do not have additional markings on them beside the left/right symbols, unlike the up/down keys that contain Pg markings. This is according to the large and clear picture of the keyboard in this article:
I just got my XPS 13 9300 2020 model and extremely disappointed with this problem. I am coming from Surface Book 2 and I do spend most of my time with word. This problem alone will reduce my text document navigation speed maybe 30-40%.
This is such a let down after spending 2000$ on a laptop that you can't have a basic keyboard feature.
And what is worse is, seems like people have been complaining about this for more than a year, and yet nobody is taking action to solve it.
are you guys working on a solution for this by any chance? With the current situation and coding a lot on my laptop, I really feel this issue as it strongly decreases my code maneuverability
I don't know how much good this will do, but there is a Dell Rockstars section of the forum that contains a "Product and Service Ideas" subsection. Since Rockstars are ostensibly meant to be a conduit to Dell, I just created a thread there urging Dell to bring back Fn+Left/Right as Home/End. It could easily be done with a firmware update, and even if Home/End are labeled on top row keys and the Left/Right keys aren't labeled as Home/End, there's nothing wrong with having two different ways to trigger those functions. In fact, I used a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 2 that implemented that exact design. It has top row keys labeled as Home/End, but Fn+Left/Right also triggers Home/End.
I can't see any possible downside to Dell replicating Lenovo's design here. Given that Fn+Left/Right currently does nothing on the affected systems, and a firmware update to add this would be a trivial amount of work, and NOT having this functionality is leading to frustrated users, system returns, and lost sales, the cost/benefit equation here is a no-brainer.
I hope this goes somewhere, because as a heavy user of keyboard shortcuts myself, this would be an absolute dealbreaker for me personally.
Can confirm that on my shiny XPS 13 9300 (2020 edition), I cannot use fn-left or fn-right as "home" or "end". Not even under Linux where I could remap the keys.
fn-left and fn-right don't even send any event codes, meaning that the firmware ignores it.
Dell tried hard because the new keyboard is _good_ and the 16:10 display ratio is great for text manipulation. However it's these details that cripple it. Which goes to show that if you're really concerned about coding or text editing, you're better off with a Lenovo laptop.
Microsoft also manages to have dedicated home and end buttons but ALSO puts them on fn left+right arrow. It seems so easy, why can't Dell do this? So disappointed about this on my 9300.
Like I said before I bought the XPS 7390 well aware that Fn-Left/Right didn't map to Home/End.
However, the fact that that model has physical dedicated physical Home/End keys on the top row helped soften the blow.
However, Dell chose in the 9300 to no longer make Home/End dedicated keys and instead share them with F11/F12. Just to be clear: I use function keys all the time and I don't want to Fn-F11/F12 whenever I need to Home/End. I couldn't care less about the multi-media controls on the top row.
Dell can make this right simply by mapping Fn-Left/Right to Home/End while keeping the rest of the layout the same.
Otherwise, I'll have no choice but to give my business to a competitor that has a sensible Home/End mechanism when it comes time to replace my laptop.
TheseusLinux
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Posted January 3rd, 2020 14:00