On my old Dell xps 14 laptop, the function button was close to the arrow keys, making it very convenient to use one-handed. I actually preferred it to a separate home button, because, in a text box, I often want to jump to the start/end of a line and then move a word or two inward -- do-able using control+arrows. It was almost as good as vim, although of course I had to take my hand off the home row.
Home and end are most useful for me when I'm writing or programming, so both of my hands are on the keyboard anyway. I think I actually find these key combos more useful than a dedicated home or end button, as I'd have to move my hands a lot further for those.
It does for me. I've always used ⌘+up and ⌘+down to go to the top and bottom of the page. After eight years of using Macs, I didn't even know you could use the function key as suggested above.
Yeah, unless the doc is dozens+ pages long. Say, a book on a single page. Then it’s real nice to have a key sequence to get around. Going to the start or end of a long document is an infrequent enough operation I think a two hand sequence is fine.
Hm, that would indeed be an alternative. I never tried hooking up a (windows-) keyboard to a mac, but don't see why it shouldn't work. Question is if the software or editors support the key layout.
And, of course, you can always mess with key bindings for a user by creating a file at ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict with custom overrides for whatever.
I have Home & End on my keyboard, but they are not very conveniently located. Mapping <Super>-A and <Super>-E to Home and End is much more ergonomic (or you can use other modifier like <Ctrl> or <Alt>). Not sure though which keys should be mapped to PageUp/PageDown. Those are not terribly useful keys anyway if you use touchpad or Space.
Also, use Up Arrow to go to the beginning of the line and Down Arrow to go to the end of the line on single line text boxes (I use it often on browser address bars).
