I have a smaller keyboard that doesn’t have dedicated arrow keys, or any of the home, page up, etc. They’re all on the numpad, so numlock for me is very useful.

I haven’t used numlock in years but I remember that for certain games that you played with the arrow keys, I preferred to use the arrows on the numpad instead of the dedicated ones.

And according to Wikipedia, the reason why numlock exists in the first place is the fact that certain keyboards didn’t have dedicated arrow keys, but did have a numpad. I guess numlock on full-sized keyboards is just a relic that keyboard manufacturers are schlepping around because it’s cheap enough to produce and doesn’t really hurt 🤷

no use whatsoever. this is an artifact from the days when the arrows, etc. did not exist as separate keys.

For a full size, 104-key PC keyboard, everything that is mapped to the numpad is also somewhere else, and the keys are spaced out enough that you’d almost never need to turn off the numpad, so the key is just there for oddball legacy apps that do weird stuff. It was more important before IBM released the fully “modern” 101-key Model M.

For laptop keyboards and other reduced format keyboards that still include all or part of a numpad, it can still be useful. I actually use autohotkeys instead, but one of my budget mechanical keyboards only has the arrow nav keys and the rest are accessed by turning off NumLock.

It’s useful if you enable Mouse Keys mode. Which is useful if you find yourself without a working mouse for one reason or another.

I think it is still is useful, as some software still hasn’t figured out how to turn on numlock automatically, and for a few applications number pad scrolling can be better than the arrow keys, but it is probably less useful than the scroll lock key at this point.

An easy indicator to see if a computer is on / wake it up / see if the keyboard is connected / see if a PC has crashed.

Yes, there are arrows on the numeric keyboard which can be used for various reasons, also home and end buttons.

It’s a relic of the past. Old keyboards didn’t have dedicated arrow keys and since many programs were only controlled by arrow keys rather than a mouse, having a num lock key was a good solution to the problem. But if you are still stuck in an environment where you have to navigate a lot with arrow keys, the num lock still comes in handy. Having Pg Up and Down and the Home/End keys nearby is super handy in this situation.

It’s still useful for some old video games, especially for multiplayer where both play at the same time.

I can’t even remember when I would’ve needed the arrow keys on the numpad.

My keyboard has also SysRq, Scroll lock and Pause/Break keys on top of the numpad, never needed any of them.

Never used it, really inconvenient. Stays off here and now you gave me an idea to rebind to something useful.

It depends on if you are a heavy mouse user or a heavy keyboard user and you are using a laptop with a restricted keyboard. Personally to scroll a document I prefer the buttons page up/down home/end. Often I also use those buttons to select big parts of a file that I want to copy. E. g. Shift+Ctrl+End form me is a useful combination. On the other hand I rarely use the numeric pad for numbers, but I also feel more comfortable typing with the left hand, I guess that a lot more people heavy keyboard user would prefer the numeric pad.

Yes the mouse is changing the habits for a lot of people, but the numlock may still be useful for some.

How am I going to make an auto clicker then? With 5 and + held at the same time it keeps clicking really fast.

Yes. On my keyboard there’s no separate “end” key, it’s part of 3 on the numpad, that key is very useful when using the terminal, because you don’t need to wait for 5 years for the cursor to make it to the end of your command.

I actually have a collegaue who uses the numeric keys as arrows and shit, he uses the NumLock pretty regularly.

He is the only one I actually know who does that, tho.