Keyboard alternatives for ‘End’ & ‘Del’ keys?

I recently got a new laptop (a Dell Latitude E5400 running Windows 7 Pro’) but its keyboard layout is a little different to my old one. Notably, the ‘End’ key, which was on the RHS of the right shift key on my old laptop, has now halved in size and crammed into the top right corner on my new laptop, in amongst a group of buttons that includes the Home, Delete, Page Up etc keys.

So, what I did with no thought for many years now causes me to have to stop, look for the tiny keys new position, identify which of the set is End and hit it very precisely. I didn’t realise I used ‘End’ so much until it started to interrupt my flow when typing. In short, it’s a pain. No doubt it’ll get easier as time goes on but I very much doubt it’ll be the fluid unconscious action it’s been for all these years.

So... as odd as it may sound, is there a keyboard alternative to hitting the ‘End’ key?

And while I’m here, is there also an alternative for the ‘Del’ key? I had it mind that Shift+BackSpace did the same thing but apparently not.

3 Answers

You could use your embedded numeric keypad keys. On the HP that I'm using if I hold Fn and press 1 it's the same as pressing End, Fn-7 is Home, Fn-. is Del, etc., the same key arrangement as a numeric keypad on a full-size keyboard with Numlock turned off.

I use autohotkey which is great for stuff like this. Make any key do anything you want it to. You can make Shift+BackSpace do that and/or much, much more. It's open source.

Remap some of the keys on your keyboard - this is fairly easy to do...

See this tutorial from the How-To Geek:

Map Any Key to Any Key on Windows 7 / XP / Vista