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Sean Dempsey

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Aug 7, 2006
1,622
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Four more F's than what I am used to... but when I press them nothing happens. Is there a OSX fucntion to map these to commands? What are they intended to do in OSX?


Thanks!
 
In general, they do nothing. Apple laptops don't have these keys, so there can't really be any major OS X functions mapped to them. Some sophisticated pro-level apps may be able to take advantage of them, and you can also map other common functions to them in System Preferences --> Keyboard & Mouse --> Keyboard Shortcuts.
 
F14 and F15 should adjust the brightness of your display.

You can assign them to in System Preference - Keyboard- Keyboard Shortcuts(or something like that, currently away from my mac)

Or if you want to be able to assign them to change tracks in iTunes etc. then you can use an application like sizzlingkeys. May also want to check out onekey or something like that enables you to assign more complicated things to it, like applescripts etc.
 
I am on a Mac Pro, I should add.

I was able to map screenshots to F13 successfully, but the System Prefs will not allow any mapping of 14 15 16

F14 and 15 do nothing at all, and F16 does nothing I can see, but if I hit F16 repeatedly, it pegs all four CPU cores at around 40%!

not sure what it's doing, but it's doing something
 
Solution: Disable shortcuts under "Display" in system Preferences, Keyboard Shortcuts

Just for the record.... The solution was to go into the Keyboard Shortcuts in the System Preferences and, under Display, uncheck the entries for increasing/decreasing brightness.

I found that in the QuicKeys FAQ. I'm not actually using QuicKeys, but I'm pretty sure it's the same problem. Until you do what I've described here, it seems that nothing else in the system can detect that F14 and F15 have been pressed. There's also some great info on Mac keyboard remapping at Jacob Rus' page on the Cocoa Text System.

I know this is an old post, but I wasted a bunch of time trying to solve this tonight, finding a lot of forum threads like this with the same question, but but no satisfactory answer.
 
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The F14-F16 keys are mapped by Boot-Camp to
F14 -> Print Screen
F15 -> Scroll Lock
F16 -> Pause
 
Crap FIFTEEN years ago:

Unknown.jpeg
 
At least the fkeys are generic, used for most anything you desire.
[rant] When do I get my numlock key back? Now that's a single purpose key that you can actually use. (I just don't remember what that use was, except when I would accidentally would trigger it, then lose a half hour discovering how to turn it back off :cool: ) [/rant]
 
At least the fkeys are generic, used for most anything you desire.
Karabiner elements rules!
and on a PC with Power toys, you can reassign every key even Scroll lock to F15. :p

The only caveat is on a Mac running Boot Camp. The BC drivers will hard-assign
F14 -> Print Screen
F15 -> Scroll Lock
F16 -> Pause
and that additionally to Power toys, so with f14-F5 you get a strange behavior if you do other things with these keys.
 
This also works the other way around.

On macos [print screen] [scroll lock] and [pause] map to [f13] [f14] and [f15].
When assigned in shortcuts you will see f13 even though karabiner-eventsviewer will report [print screen].

Moreover macos let me assign functions to [F1] to [F19] keys, and ignore all function keys [F20] and above. (I mention this as I've found this thread looking for unused keys that macos let me assign, so I can put them on unused keys on a moonlander keyboard.)
 
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