Fn + Esc

I have a ThinkPad P50 laptop, which I use as my dev machine instead of a desktop PC. It's a beast of a laptop -- big and heavy -- but it works well as a portable workstation. Powerful CPU, dedicated GPU, decent-sized screen, tolerably good battery life (3-4 hours, under fairly heavy use, including Genymotion), and 64 GB of RAM, which was hard to find in a laptop when I bought it. As a work-from-home independent developer, it's highly valuable to have a workstation I can toss in my backpack.

However... working full-time on a laptop is hell on your back and neck. To improve my posture, I got a laptop stand. This puts my screen at eye level, where it needs to be so I can sit upright and look straight forward. But that means I need a separate keyboard. I'm a huge fan of ThinkPad keyboards, so I went with the KT-1255 ThinkPad Compact Bluetooth Keyboard. It's not as good as my P50 keyboard, but it has most of what I want. (The two biggest drawbacks I've encountered are: occasional Bluetooth disconnects, which I'm hoping are fixed by the driver update I installed this morning; and I wish the Fn keys were grouped, with gaps after every fourth key, as they are on my laptop keyboard.)

As a software developer, I am a heavy user of my function keys. When I updated the keyboard driver this morning, the keyboard switched back to its default mode, where you have to hold down the Fn key plus the function key in order for it to register as F1, F2, etc. Lenovo clearly thought people would prefer to access the special features like brightness control more often that the standard function keys. I vaguely recalled having to install some special software or fiddle with a setting somewhere in order to get it to lock the Fn keys as always-on... but it turns out I was thinking of a different Bluetooth keyboard I bought, which now sits unused in a corner.

The first time you hit Fn + Esc, you'll see a cryptic little dialog box asking you whether you want to enable the function-lock feature. Click OK. Then hit Fn + Esc to toggle between the two modes: Fn keys locked; or special features locked (which means you have to hold down Fn + F1 instead of just hitting F1).

The Esc key even has "FnLk" printed on it, in tiny text, but my keyboard is partially in the shadow of the laptop stand, and I didn't notice this.

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