> seriously, who uses F-keys? It's wasted real estate

I'm sorry, what?

I use them all the time. F5 for refreshing all kinds of stuff, or for setting breakpoints in my IDE. F7, F8, F9 for controlling the debugger, other combinations for building/running. F12 for opening developer tools in the browser. Some programs still use F1 for help. F2 in Windows explorer for renaming things. And so on and so forth.

I can't stand keyboards without function keys, or where you have to press Fn to activate them.

That's because you're used to them, that's fine. Many of those actions can be done via key combos or other keys (esp on a Mac), like C+R to refresh, C+Sh+I for browser console or Enter to rename a file. Function keys at this point are certainly old school and could even be considered an atavism, like the Print Screen button or the numeric keypad.

Some functions have replacements, others don't. Just one example: both F5 and CTRL-R in browsers do a refresh; CTRL-F5 does a hard refresh (also renews the cache); I don't think there's a non-function-key alternative for that. Losing the function keys would be a major nuisance.

The numeric keypad is useful to me too. A bit less than the function keys, perhaps, but when entering a list of numbers it works so much better. What's more: keyboards without numeric keypad also tend not to have the section with ins/del, home/end, pgup/pgdn and arrow keys; instead those keys are often arranged in cumbersome and inconsistent layouts. I use those a lot too.

I don't know in exactly which meaning you use the word "atavism", but I do know that having all these keys available, in a familiar layout, is very very useful to me.

In the meaning of outdated artifacts, like those turbo buttons on old PC boxes or three button mice. Fn + arrow keys or fn+bksp for del easily replace the specific navigation keys and are for me easier to find by touch with less movement of the wrist.

I had the impression you meant something like that, but I wasn't sure (I'm not a native English speaker) so I looked it up and the dictionary gave me a different meaning, so that got me confused.

In Firefox CTRL+SHIFT+R does a hard refresh as well. I don’t know about other browsers.

Tons of software uses the function keys, especially Windows/cross-platform software. Lots of engineering tools, editing tools, content authoring, programming, etc.

Removing them would break compatibility with an awful lot of things, including Windows itself (which lots of people run using Bootcamp or Parallels). Maybe they're weird, I don't know. Momentum is a powerful force, especially when it comes to software design.

Also for the record, Print Screen takes a screenshot on Windows (and on a lot of Linux systems), which is intuitive and simple. Just because you don't use it doesn't mean it's an abandoned key.

It's insane how monitor software hasn't developed an inch from the 90s. How hard can it be to have an open API for the basic controls at least so the OS can adjust them? Everything about my monitor is great - 144hz refresh rate, great viewing angle and colors - except if I want to change any of the physical properties (brightness, contrast) I'm clicking around on a variety of buttons that I can't see like I'm trying to set the clock on my VCR.

This actually exists, and it’s called DDC/CI: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel

I only recently learned about it myself while setting up a new monitor and asking myself wtf is this DDC/CI setting in the menu.

Thanks for the hot tip! I've been struggling with my monitor's menu buttons, but after reading your comment I found the macOS tool MonitorControl, which works perfectly.

I can control laptop brightness with `/sys/class/backlight/foo`, and my asus external monitor advertises capabilities over hdmi with `modprobe i2c-dev` and then `ddcutil capabilities`. Apparently this is governed by something called MCCS. You can find more info on the arch wiki.

I have a script with ddccontrol to change brightness of my external monitor:

    ddccontrol -r 0x10 -w ${NUM}0  dev:/dev/i2c-${DEV_NUM}

The internal:

    BACKLIGHT_PATH="/sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness"
    sh -c "echo ${NUM} > $BACKLIGHT_PATH"

The numbers are a slightly different scale, so I adjust them in the script.

If your monitor supports DDC [1] you can control the brightness with MonitorControl [2]. It's fantastic. However it's basically impossible to figure out before buying if monitors do or don't support DDC. In general Dell Ultrasharps do, and I was surprised when the old Acer I'm on now did as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel [2] https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl

I agree that brightness should be easier to reach. On my Dell monitor, it can be configured to be behind one button press, then changed with up / down. On my LG monitor, it's atrocious. Have to go 2-3 layers deep with an awful joystick.

This is one of the reasons I absolutely love my Apple display. It changes brightness automatically and most of the time it does it right.

Also, DDC/CI is a thing and (sometimes) works.

On Windows, I've found Twinkle Tray on the store works reasonably well.

For Linux there's ddcci-dkms on Ubuntu and ddcci-driver-linux-dkms for Arch Linux (on the AUR). They allow configuring the brightness as a regular backlight device. See the Arch Linux Wiki [0].

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backlight#External_moni...

https://clickmonitorddc.bplaced.net/ I rarely use the interface anymore, this software has replaced it. Unfortunately I'm unaware of anything that works well for any other operating system. There's a rust library I've used in the past for DDC I think, but that means coding your own implementations, and I was only making a source switcher

> seriously, who uses F-keys?

Mainframe programmers.

They are an essential part of interacting with an IBM mainframe (even for basic things like paging up and down through documents).

> "One of Apple's biggest innovations imho was to make brightness +/- two of the default keyboard buttons"

Microsoft copied this with the Surface Book (at least). And in typical Microsoft style, the dedicated brightness buttons control the brightness of the keyboard internal LEDs. Changing Windows' screen brightness is one of the metakeys + del/backspace, not indicated on them.

I just got a new Surface tablet, and the tablet cover keyboard's brightness buttons definitely control the screen, not the keyboard lighting.

> Every keyboard should replace their F-keys with brightness by default (seriously, who uses F-keys? It's wasted real estate.)

If the keyboard has media keys, then, generally speaking, F2 and F3 will be linked to brightness by default.

I have an external keyboard that's a common split-ergo design, probably one of the top 3 workhorses on amazon for "ergo keyboard" (Apple hardware is pretty, but it's not ergonomic).

By dumb luck I just found that it's ScrLk and Pause/Break that do brightness controls on my external monitor on os-x.

I wish apple made it as easy to remap these kinds of global shortcut keys as IDE's do.

Back in the day of CRTs there used to be a dial on monitors to set the brighness. Have you only ever used Apple computers?

Yeah, now the brightness controls are a touch screen themselves.

That’s not even a joke.