Often, the middle or the wheel mouse button works as a toggle determining if mouse movements will move the mouse cursor or scroll the contents in scroll window. Most GUI environments neglect Scroll Lock, which means scrolling must be accomplished with a mouse, using means such as scrollbars or scroll wheels.
Some text editors (such as Notepad++, Microsoft Visual Studio) exhibit similar behavior when the arrow keys are used with Ctrl pressed. Modern programs honoring this behavior include IBM Lotus Notes, Forté Agent, Image-Line FL Studio, Renoise, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, LibreOffice Calc, and on occasions Microsoft Word. Today, this particular use of Scroll Lock is rare. In this usage, Scroll Lock is a toggling lock key like Num Lock or Caps Lock, which have a state that persists after the key is released. When the Scroll Lock mode was on, the arrow keys would scroll the contents of a text window instead of moving the cursor. In the original design, Scroll Lock was intended to modify the behavior of the arrow keys. The Scroll Lock key was meant to lock all scrolling techniques, and is a vestige of the original IBM PC keyboard. 2 Scroll Lock on keyboards without a Scroll Lock keyįunction Window scrolling.