I guess my relationship with the Lenovo 3000 N100 laptop is a complicated one: as much as I hated the Home/End/Page up/Page down combo madness, I truely missed that 2 extra buttons that my Dell D830 doesn’t have. Now instead of just flicking my finger to hit Home or End, I have to move my entire arm to reach for either End or Home. Even though now I won’t make any mistakes with Home/End jumping as with the Lenovo, I have to slow down the typing with the Dell…. NO! Only if Dell put the 2 extra home/end button next to their Arrow buttons… Why can’t we just live happily with each other? Is it really that hard to design a good working keyboard, or is it me that just being picky about laptop keyboard?
“Good news everyone…”, as the Professor Farnsworth would say in his quite-mischevious voice, I have the fix for my crave for the Home/End buttons. AutoHotKey allows me to map custom shortcut to the keyboard, especially the Windows key. I mostly use the Windows key as the … boss key to quickly hide my stuff on the screen (Window + D), or run command (Window + R), or start Explorer (Window + E), even though these days I prefer xplorer2. With AutoHotKey, I was able to map Window + A to the Home Button, and Window + S to the End button, saving me from wiggling my arm around.
So if you are not satisfied with your laptop keyboard, give AutoHotKey a try. Maybe it will save you some aggravation.
Here is the small script to remap your Home and End button: AutoHotKey.ahk
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I’ve been struggling with similar problems regarding the keyboard layout and specifically the “home” and “end” keys. I too had Lenovo or actually it was IBM which was equipped with separate section for insert/delete/home/end/page up/page down keys, as in the standard desktop keyboards. Now, after using a while my new HP tx2000 laptop, I’ve begun to appreciate IBM’s approach. This one has all previously mentioned 6 keys in the top right corner, all next to each other in a continuous row with F1-F12 keys. http://laptoplogic.com/data/reviews/images/211/tx2000_keyboard.jpg
Delete button is easy to find because it’s the button in top right corner but hitting “home” and “end” buttons can be a hustle sometimes, not to mention the distance your hand need to travel each time you need one of those keys. I’ve been daydreaming of getting fn+ left, right, up and down arrow keys to function as home, end, page up, page down, respectively. Your post seems to have a solution my problem, even though the user interface of AutoHotKey seems a bit too “challenging” for my taste.
Btw, do you have any experience whether one can use AutoHotKey to map Fn + key combinations?