New XPS 13 owner here a little frustrated by the keyboard.
I can't find any way in the BIOS to swap Fn and Ctrl keys. I can't seem to do it in Linux either, because the Fn key appears to be invisible to the OS. For example, if I run xev and press the Fn key, nothing happens.
The reason I want to do this is that I keep hitting Fn-C instead of Ctrl-C. The left Ctrl and C keys are further apart on the XPS 13 keyboard than they are on a desktop keyboard!
This has nothing to do with the question, which is about putting the Ctrl and Fn keys where they should be, not where Dell has placed them. It's particularly annoying if you want to do a Ctrl-Shift combination, which on sensible keyboards is a middle and ring finger combination, where they line up sensibly. On the Dell laptop, it is really awkward with the keys being above each other. If the Dell were the only keyboard I had ever used, I would probably get used to it, but it isn't and it is hard to unlearn several decades of use, and remember to swap between this aberrant behaviour and normal whenever I use a different PC, which I do for work.
Same story on the XPS 15. Why on earth are there no dedicated keys for Home/End/PgUp/PgDn? It is such a pain to not have them. They are probably the most used keys after arrows, enter and space. Btw Enter is so narrow too... And still there is plenty of space left all around the keyboard, so why? Why?
Anyway, I would very *very* much like to be able to use the right ctrl key (the one next to the arrows) as Fn key so that I can type Home/End/PgUp/PgDn single-handedly and somewhat go around this serious omission.
I'm also not happy. On most keyboards, and on an external with the XPS, Ctrl+Home goes to the top (beginning) of a document. Likewise, everywhere except with the XPS keyboard, the Page Up and Page Down keys work without another key being pressed. Without the Fcn key, they move three lines at a time.
wakalixes
5 Posts
16904
4
Posted July 11th, 2017 22:00
I have convinced myself that remapping Fn to Ctrl and left Ctrl to Fn is impossible unless Dell releases a BIOS update that allows for it.
I cannot be the only person to want this.
Dell, is it possible that a Fn/Ctrl key swap feature could be added to the BIOS?