In what world would anybody need to deactivate their numpad?
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So my follow-up question is the opposite: why is there the option to lock it at all?
My teaching job rarely includes typing numbers, but when doing basic data entry I prefer the number pad infinitely. To the point that on my personal keyboard at home I had to convince myself NOT to buy an ergonomic number pad to go with my ergonomic keyboard so I could stay under budget for my home work set up.
Who benefits from keeping it locked?
Early PC keyboards didn’t have the separate navigation (up, down, left, right, pg up, etc) keys. You had to use the ones on the number pad. It’s just a relic from that era.
In addition to /u/mmmmmmBacon12345’s excellent point about spreadsheets, a lot of old games used to use numpad for 8-direction movement. For quite a few years I played games way more than I punched in numbers so I always had numlock off. With the advent of WASD as a common control scheme that changed.
I’d love to know the answer to this. I (thankfully) don’t have one on my desktop but my laptop still has one. I wish it didn’t as I’ve never intentionally shut it off and for a while the geniuses at Microsoft had the thing default to OFF every time I booted the laptop. It serves no purpose as every character or function it gives you access to can also be accessed through a dedicated key elsewhere on the keyboard.
More importantly. Wtf is the purpose of caps lock?? In normal use youre going to capitalise firat letters so one capital letter which is faster and more conveniently done with shift and less keypresses. What purpose does it actually serve?
Atleast when you deactivate numlock it serves the purpose of the keys becoming different inputs
Because not everyone uses the computer or keyboard like you do, and the speed and precision of using keys is valued by some users over using a mouse (like some professions that do massive amounts of data entry into excel), and to give options to people who literally can’t use a mouse.
On the original IBM PC keyboard (Model F), certain keys like the arrow keys, Insert, Delete, Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End weren’t discrete keys and were on the number pad. NumLock tells the computer “hey, I want to input numbers and not these special commands”. On the Model M keyboard, it was held over, because of familiarity and legacy support.
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