Scroll Lock

Some text editors (such as Notepad++, Microsoft Visual Studio) exhibit similar behavior when the arrow keys are used with Ctrl pressed.

Some web browsers including Google Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer support a caret browsing mode which can be toggled by F7.

Pressing the Scroll Lock key in the Linux console while the text is scrolling through the screen freezes the console output (but not input) during which no further text is sent to the screen, while the program continues running as usual, or become blocked at the write syscall when too much data prevented from reaching the terminal caused the tty's output queue to become full and the tty file descriptor is not using non-blocking I/O.

When Scroll Lock is pressed again, the screen is unfrozen and all text generated during the freeze is displayed at once and the program continues to run normally.

This behavior emulates the Hold Screen key or similar flow control mechanisms on computer terminal hardwares.

The behavior should be distinguished from pressing the Pause key during POST or under DOS, which, by default, has the effect of temporarily halting the running process.

The Linux console implemented this behaviour by using ⇧ Shift+Page Up and ⇧ Shift+Page Down, not requiring Scroll Lock to be active; this behavior has been removed due to a vulnerability (CVE-2020-14390).

The operating system, however, will temporarily suspend any automatic timeouts (TIMEOUT=,,) in CONFIG.SYS trace (TRACE=ON|OFF) and F7/F8 single-stepping modes for as long as Scroll Lock is active.

In conjunction with the alternative DOS keyboard and console drivers FreeKEYB and K3PLUS, Scroll Lock also serves as part of a copy & paste facility between applications.

Once invoked, pressing F11 (or the left mouse button) the characters under the CopyCursor can be stuffed, one after another, into the keyboard buffer, from where they will be read by the running application as emulated key (or Alt Numpad) input, thereby typically showing up at the location of the standard cursor.

Pressing Esc or ↵ Enter exits the CopyCursor, so that, on its next invocation, it will show up at the position of the standard cursor again rather than at its previous location.

The scroll-lock key with an activated indicator light on an IBM Model M keyboard .
Tilde Exclamation mark At sign Number sign Dollar sign Percent sign Caret Ampersand Asterisk Parenthesis Parenthesis Underscore Plus sign Backspace Backtick 1 (number) 2 (number) 3 (number) 4 (number) 5 (number) 6 (number) 7 (number) 8 (number) 9 (number) 0 Hyphen-minus Equals sign Backspace Tab key Q W E R T Y U I O P Curly bracket Curly bracket Vertical bar Tab key Q W E R T Y U I O P Square bracket Square bracket Backslash Caps lock A S D F G H J K L Colon (punctuation) Quotation mark Enter key Caps lock A S D F G H J K L Semicolon Apostrophe Enter key Shift key Z X C V B N M Bracket Bracket Question mark Shift key Shift key Z X C V B N M Comma (punctuation) Full stop Slash (punctuation) Shift key Control key Windows key Alt key Space bar Alt key thumb Menu key Control key