I've always found that behavior baffling so it's interesting to hear someone using it as intended instead of being frustrated by it.
replyIt used to be a de facto standard in many programs. Since almost no mouse had a scroll wheel, you'd use the space bar or the cursor keys. Spacebar was usually faster, I guess some people still do.
replyI do this too. The pattern probably dates back to first Unix pagers, or perhaps to the paper era.
replyStill doing that, also in Thunderbird, to scroll through E-Mails and go to the next one when reaching the end (or pressing "n" or "p" for previous). I even use shift + space to go up again. I thought it was very common. Another alternative, maybe a bit more intuitive is using page up and down buttons.
replyi love it. my mac doesn't have the home row (don't know if that's how that row of buttons is called) so I use spacebar and shift+spacebar as pgdown and pgup when I am reading
reply>the home row (don't know if that's how that row of buttons is called)
replythe "home row" is where your fingers start out if you know how to type by touch, and it come from the days of typewriters instead of keyboards.
on a QWERTY keyboard, the home row is ASDFGHJKL; with your fingers resting on ASDF and JKL;
when they teach you to touch type, they say "put your fingers on the home row" and "home is where your fingers always return to."
[fn]+[up arrow] = pgup, [fn]+[down arrow] = pgdown, [fn]+[left arrow] = home, [fn]+[right arrow] = end
replyThese are impossible to press with just one hand (or the bottom of my coffee cup in a pinch), though.
replyI use option + up arrow or option + down arrow sometimes, works the same as spacebar to page up / page down.
replyIn which browser? Doesn't work in Firefox, unfortunately.
replyUnfortunately I'm using Chrome still.
reply"Home row" usually refers to the row where you initially put your fingers when touch typing, to not have to move them much while typing.
replyThey're called the navigation keys. Fn + Up/Down (arrow keys) is PgUp/PgDn, and Fn + Left/Right is Home/End. But of course, those keys are on completely opposite sides of the keyboard, so Space is more convenient.
replyyeah, with spacebar i can use either of my hands while the arrow keys would require me to use both of my hands
replyI am often annoyed Mac does not have a right Ctrl or a right Fn.
replyThis is my biggest gripe with modern browsers. Stop fucking with my keyboard. I want my keyboard to control my agent, not some script. No key seems to be safe. The quick-search key (/) is often overriden by "clever" web devs, but not even in a consistent way. Ctrl-K to go to the browser search box is gone. I use emacs keybindings in text boxes, but those can be randomly overriden by scripts (e.g. Ctrl-B might by overridden to make stuff "bold" etc.).
replyI want to be able to say "Don't let any script have access to these keyboard keys". But apparently that can't be done even with extensions. I've strongly considered forking Firefox to do this, but I know how much effort that would be to maintain.
How hard would it be to write scripts that expose an interface that the user can bind to keys themselves, if they wish to?
One more for the spacebar to advance the page. Have never encountered a broken site (so far). Fingers crossed.
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