In what world would anybody need to deactivate their numpad?
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Before touchpads and mice, computers started out with just a keyboard. The number pad was a great way to navigate through a document one-handed.
With num-lock off, the arrow keys could precisely position the text cursor and the page up/down and home/end buttons could do larger movements.
In case you you work as a programmer or anything like that and use the other bindings more than separate numbers. Plus on my laptop its litteraly overlaps with my normal keyboard letters.
I only turn on Numlock if I know I’ll be typing a lot of numbers, because it’s a lot faster than using the straight line of numbers.
I deactivate mine because seeing the light there on my keyboard makes me feel like I have a notification or something.
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I *always* deactivate my numlock key. Permanently, whenever possible. I have never needed or used the numeric keypad in 30 years.
I started using PC when old XT keyboards without specal cursor keys were available, so I preferred having NumLock off to use cursor-moving keys instead of the numeric keyboard.
I still rarely use numeric keyboard…
Spreadsheets, you can toggle it several times a second to switch between navigation and data entry with one hand.
Not that I can, but seen it done.
I have a secondary small keyboard on my computer. If numlock is ON, pushing the keys make numbers. When not, it makes letters.
On a 105+ keys keyboard, disabling numlock is useless, as the keys you can get access to are the same as the ones to the left of the numpad.
On any smaller keyboard, either the numpad is removed, or the arrows and pageup/down end/home/ins/del is removed. Or both, typically on mechanical keyboards where keys are expensive.
Finance people have numlock on all the time so they get numbers when they press the keys because they prefer numpads to long lines of numbers (quicker to type in digits and numerical figures). They use the numpad like a calculator, basically.
Gamers used to numlock off all the time so they get cursor movement when they press those same keys instead (the normal cursor keys only give you left, right, up and down, but with the numpad you have diagonals (1, 3, 7, 9) and a centre button too – and many games used this).
Like all the lights on your keyboard, the buttons are technically no longer necessary (CapsLock is convenient, you could argue, but not necessary). If you want, look at Scroll Lock which nobody has used in 20 years, to be honest (it was to stop the text scrolling off the top of a text terminal).
In those days, keys like this were called modifiers and were treated differently to the letter or number keys. Ctrl-Alt-Delete used to generate what’s called a non-maskable interrupt (i.e. something that the OS cannot interfere with in any way, to let you reboot the machine if the OS locked up). Now it’s used to lock your machine and log onto it.
Nowadays, though, all keys are just inputs. Scroll lock registers a scancode just like any other key, so you can assign it to do almost anything you like (e.g. in a game’s keyboard configuration). Num Lock the same. And the keys that Num Lock affects don’t really change now (games etc. just know what the key is the same no matter whether Num Lock is on or off and treat it appropriately, but things like Word will either type numbers or move you around the document depending on the state of Num Lock).
So it’s mostly legacy, but it does have a use, it’s just not a use that most people would make.
NumLock and ScrollLock both exist for those people who are spreadsheet ~~Archmages~~ experts
The number pad is by far the fastest way to punch numbers into a spreadsheet repeatedly, that’s why it exists. Having access to arrow keys on the same hand speeds up navigation of nearby cells while access to Home (go to the left-most cell), End (goes to the right-most cell), Page up, and Page down speed up access to distant points on the sheet.
Scroll lock is another key that exists almost solely for navigation of spreadsheets. If you are in Excel and you turn on ScrollLock you can use the arrow keys to move the screen without losing the cell that you’re in so you can pan up and right to see columns/rows you may be missing but still be able to type in your selected cell. Again, just a key that exists almost solely for improved navigation in spreadsheet programs
So your next thought is, why do we need keys for this? You can clearly just use the mouse to move around or click on the cell you want
Except for many years you didn’t have a mouse. Back in the before times, a lot of “computers” were terminals that accessed a mainframe and timeshared, LANPAR was a spreadsheet program for Mainframes back in 1969. Microsoft DOS didn’t support a mouse until 1982, and mice were uncommon until around 1985. That’s about 25 years of spreadsheet programs being in common use without mice being in common use.
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