Control-Home / Control End Keys

opensas,

Unfortunately, I do not see that there is any options to change the keys to perform as you are suggesting.

Funny, when I first encountered a system that had Home/End as Fn keys on the arrow keys, I hated it because my muscle memory from previous laptops -- and all desktop keyboards -- had trained me to move my hand upward to use Home/End.  I still miss my Precision M6300 that had a full 3 across, 2 down arrangement of those navigation keys, just like proper desktop keyboards until even some of those started rearranging them....

Anyhow, any keyboard command that involves holding down the Fn key would have to be handled by firmware, so if the firmware doesn't support accepting Fn+Left in order to send a "Home" keypress and Fn+Right to send "End", then there's nothing you can do about it.  Theoretically I suppose Dell could provide a firmware update to allow this, but I wouldn't bet on that happening.  I've never heard of firmware updates to add optional functions to keyboards that aren't printed on the keys themselves, with the semi-exception of Lenovo ThinkPads where you can swap the roles of the Fn and Ctrl keys since they position those keys backwards from the rest of the PC industry, so allowing them to be swapped makes it easier for people whose muscle memory isn't based on Lenovo's backwards layout to use Lenovo systems.  Strangely, their IdeaPad line uses the correct layout.  I guess at this point they're too scared to change the ThinkPad keyboard since they're known for their keyboards and therefore they don't want to rock the boat with the Lenovo faithful.  But I digress.

Hi

I have the same issue.

Moving the Home/End away from the old place is frustrating and annoying. 
What makes vendors think that this is an good idea to do such changes when customers have been used to the old layout for several years? 

Please make it possible to change the behavior of the FN keys.

Hi,

Navigating with fn + arrows is really convenient and logical, please make this happen. If you're doing lots of text manipulation (e.g. programming (developers edition anyone?)) navigating text is extremelly important. I was thinking switching from my 9550 to 13 xps, but it won't happen with this keyboard. IMHO fn + arrows navigation should be default i any given laptop.

So xps 13 does not match this criteria, I guess I'll keep searching elsewhere... :/

Oh boy, I just went to Fn+Shift+Left to select my text and saw that this was the case. 

What the?? This was a horrible decision. Especially as a programmer, I legitimately might have to return this laptop and get the older one. The use of the arrow keys was extremely effective once I got used to it.

Now with it above the function keys, I have already put the computer to sleep because I can never remember if the function lock is on, and so I go to use "End" and I put the computer to sleep. Why would I need such quick access to screen brightness on the arrow keys?

These are the little things that matter quite a lot. I would hope there would be an option to configure the keyboard to our own custom preference. You would be surprised how big of an inconvenience something so small can be. Did any of the developers even use this new keyboard layout after it was redesigned?

DJankowski,

Click my name and private message me the pc service tag number.

It would be really great if Dell could make a bios option for this.

fn+arrow for navigation was such a good thing!

How did this ever pass usability and human-factors testing?

I got a new 5400. The new home/end key location takes unusable to another level. I sent it back and will stick with my old 5510. 

Agreed... It's useless for me too. I use dell's laptop primarily for blogging  , and it's not helping me at all.

Comon DELL, it's been almost half a year, I'm pretty sure it must be really trivial to implement this as a firmware update (a couple days work from a developer, perhaps), and you have some of your customer that are telling you that this little detail is turning their laptops almost unusable. It's such an important thing, specially for an equipment targeted at developers.

After all this time I still cannot get used to that keyboard layout, if I had the chance to return the laptop I would have done it, but unfortunately I bought it outside my country.

I do hope you take all this feedback into account. It's a shame that such a great equipment has this flaw unsolved for such a long time...

I really hope for a firmware option that does this:

• fn + left = home
• fn + right = end
• fn + up = page up
• fn + down = page down
• remap page up to left (or to nothing because I keep pressing that key instead of left)
• remap page down to right (or to nothing because I keep pressing that key instead of right)
• fn + page up = less light
• fn + page down = more light

I totally agree with previous posts here.

The BIOS option, please make it happen, dell! Getting back the home/end/pgup/pgdn on fn+arrow keys would be awesome (instead of that strange decision to put the brightness function on up/down).

And please stop messing with the keyboard layout!

Please make this a BIOS feature, having to bounce all the way to the top of the keyboard for simple functions is supremely annoying esp when coding.

What is the drawback of having fn+arrow as home/end/page up/page down? You could also just include both mappings or not?

I just bought an XPS well aware of the lack of Fn-Left/Right Home/End functionality.

Still, this fact gave me pause before making my decision, especially since the Lenovo X1 Carbon supports this functionality in addition to featuring dedicated Home/End keys (I know because I tried this on a coworker's X1 Carbon).

As a vim user, I plan to tweak all my vim plugin mappings to enable easier to reach Home/End shortcuts than 0-$ (I'm thinking F to Home and L to End), so that should mitigate the problem.

Currently, Fn-Left/Right literally does nothing (as far as I can tell). If I'm right, Dell adding this feature will not take away anything from any other user. Dell, please make this awesome laptop even better by distributing a firmware update with this feature!

Edit:  Break up a massive paragraph that I accidentally submitted.