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I haven't seen any use for it lately? Anyone have any examples?

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Lots of duplicates superuser.com/search?q=scroll+lock –  Chris Nava Dec 7 '09 at 4:45
bah, I can't read. I initially read that as "CAPS lock key..." D'oh... –  Brian Postow Aug 3 '10 at 15:56

9 Answers 9

up vote 13 down vote accepted

It's more of a vestige from the IBM PC Keyboard. Wikipedia has a nice history on it.

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Bah, you beat me to it. –  TheTXI Jul 16 '09 at 2:36
Hehe. It was close :) You're too busy moderatin' to keep up. hehe. Thanks for the up-vote. –  Jonathan Sampson Jul 16 '09 at 2:37
+1: decent answer, I could have not have said it better... –  RSolberg Jul 16 '09 at 2:44
@RSolberg, yes you could, don't be so modest. Hehe. –  Jonathan Sampson Jul 16 '09 at 9:46

Very useful in applications like Excel sometimes, when you want to keep the cursor in a big table in its place while looking around for something.

Has other uses, but since I'm doing in excel at the present this first sprang to mind.

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The Straight Dope has a good summary:


The Scroll Lock key has appeared on the keyboards of IBM personal computers since the original 83-key PC/XT and the 84-key AT layouts, and remains on the 101-key and greater "enhanced" keyboards currently in use. The Scroll Lock key wasn't on the original Macintosh keyboards but appears on the Mac's "enhanced" keyboard.


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I have a bunch of KVMs that use Scroll-Lock, Scroll-Lock as an "attention" sequence.

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It's nice to have a few spare keys around for custom actions :)

I use scroll lock all the time to switch keyboard layouts (thanks IBM!).

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Ctrl+Scroll Lock removes annoying message "No files were found to look in. Find was stopped in progress." in Visual Studio. So 'Scroll Lock' is the best key on my keyboard.

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Auto-run in World of Warcraft and many other MMOG's.

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Actually the default for Auto-run in WoW is NumLock :) –  Traxex1909 Dec 16 '13 at 10:32

In the FreeBSD console, it stops the screen from scrolling, and allows you to page back through the buffer.

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Linux does this as well. –  new123456 Mar 16 '11 at 0:26

I use scroll lock when searching through large spreadsheets, I can move around in the spreadsheet without losing my place.

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