SharpKeys Saved My Coding Experience on an Alienware Laptop

If you have used a laptop with the Page Up and Page Down layout like the picture on the right and you do a lot of coding or any text editing on your laptop, then you may have the same issue as I do. I’m not sure why the hardware designer opt to put Page Up and Page Down keys next to the up arrow and just below the shift key. It’s prone to be pressed accidentally when pressing the up button, pressing right shift and even enter key some times.

A lot of the time when I’m scanning at source codes and word documents, when I just want to move 1 line above, I would press Page Up or Page Down by accident and the entire document scrolls to the top of the page or to the bottom of the page. It’s super annoying and breaks concentration most of the time.

I think this layout is not specific to Alienware only, there are a number of laptops out there with this layout like Dell Latitute, Lenovo Yoga, etc. So knowing this little tool will help a few people out there.

Luckily there’s this little tool called SharpKeys that enables me to disable Page Up and Page Down keys. In the background, SharpKeys modifies some registry values so that you don’t have to edit them yourself, which would have been quite cumbersome. As you can see from the screenshot below, I have disabled my Page Up and Page Down keys.

You can download SharpKeys here.

Categorised in: Coding, Open Source Codes, Software Development