WASD arrow keys swap

All of a sudden the arrow keys on your keyboard are swapped with WASD

No your keyboard is not broken you don’t have to fix or throw it away and replace it no it’s not a virus no you don’t have to search for and install any keyboard drivers because most keyboards use the same generic driver in all operating systems because this is a standard device no you don’t have to reinstall your operating system to swap the keys back you need to disconnect the keyboard from usb or ps2 port wait a couple minutes so all the residual electricity will go away and then plug it back if that doesn’t help find fn button on the keyboard press w while holding the fn button so this combination fn or function and w will switch arrow keys with wasd and back so if you’re here only because your keys are swapped and you cannot control your character in the game anymore you don’t have to watch the rest of the video just press fn and w and the keys will swap back now run kitty run play with your buddies who are waiting for you while we grown ups we’ll discuss why the keys were swapped in the first place actually this is not a bug that’s a feature today most pc gamers especially who play games with point of view perspective or third person perspective so that is most of shooters and rpg games are used to controlling the character with mouse and keyboard combo so you use your mouse to look around and turn left and right and you use w to go forward ascii to go backwards and a and d to strafe not turn but strafe to the left and to the right that’s probably the de facto standard for most games nowadays and actually the ability to use keyboard and mouse is what makes controlling a character in the pc version of the same game so much superior to say console version where you normally use a gamepad controller but this wasn’t always like this if we go back in time at least 40 years ago to the golden age of home computing when they first started to appear at homes the development was so rapid that in six months time a new machine could be put on the market sold upgraded discontinued and went to obscurity and all of that happened in less than half a year arguably during this heyday of home computing the most popular home enthusiast machine in north america was commodore 64. hundreds even thousands of games were released for this machine but they didn’t have the same control pattern most of them were controlled by the joystick but if they were controlled by the keyboard that could be any combination of any case in the old world the most popular home computer machine arguably was zayx spectrum the early versions of the machine had a very very bad keyboard basically these were rubber dom keys you may still find those in today’s tv remotes or calculators these keys were very uncomfortable and very hard to press but interestingly enough most zx spectrum games had a settings menu where you can redefine the keyboard so you can redefine the controls of your character and around this time the first standard combination appeared most zx spectrum players will use q as up a as down o as left p as right and m as jump or fire the reason space bar was not used is because those early zx spectrum games had a very short and small spacebar later revisions had those large spacebar as we’re used to now and these combinations were changed to qa op and spacebar so you would position your left hand on q and a you will use your right hand for o and p for left and right and you will use right thumb to press space for fire and sometimes m and n for additional things like grenades or whatever so that was the first truly popular combination to control a character in a video game and the interesting thing is zach’s spectrum was the first machine where players preferred to use the keyboard to control the character you could attach a joystick but no one liked to use those going forward in time to the early 90s zeke’s spectrum as a home computer was replaced by first pc compatible machines these are the grand grand parents of the same machines we use for gaming today you don’t really need to have a mouse until windows came along so lots of machines didn’t have a mouse and when you got one you mostly use the mouse to play strategy games you didn’t use that for shooters the most popular sugar games were wolfenstein 3d and obviously doom in terms of controls those were really simple games you could only go forward and back you couldn’t jump or fall in those games you couldn’t look up or down so you only run around pressed buttons and shoot and same goes for other genres of games for example racing games in those times you would normally use the arrow keys to control your character or vehicle and you will probably use space bar for shooting so the arrows up and down will move you forward and back and the left and right arrows will rotate your character not strafe to the left and right keep in the same direction but rotate your character sometimes you could strafe by holding a modifier key for example shift or there may be some dedicated keys to strafe like the brackets no one really considered playing doom on the mouse because in that case you had to constantly move your mouse up from the table put it back and push it forward on the table to run so that obviously wasn’t a very ergonomic way to control a character then quake and duke nukem 3d came along these were one of the first games where you could actually look around so you could look up and down some players used mouse to occasionally look around but most players will still use the arrowss to control the movement and will use q and a to look up and down so they will not use the mouse at all and finally everything began to change when unreal and half-life became popular mostly because they were competitive games especially when the counter-strike mod arrived for health life and in those games you had to jump a lot and look around a lot because you had to spot your opponents from above and below and this is where the major shifting controls came along players will redefine the arrows so left and right arrows will not turn your character but rather strafe the character and they will use the mouse to look around to rotate the character and to shoot however the arrows and the mouse were a little bit close together and in an effort to have a little more space between your arms and to get a little bit more comfortable the controls were shifted from the arrows to the now iconic was that happened in late 90s and everyone started to really use that in the early 2000s and that’s why nowadays most gamers are used to the wasd combination why then this keyboard swaps those keys with the arrows is it trying to mess with you so you will screw up in the games no it’s not it’s actually quite the contrary the keyboard is trying to help you this is a so called gaming keyboard alright so it’s for games there are a lot of games where you cannot change the controls and the controls will be the arrows for example there is currently resurgence in retro gaming so people play very old games from those times and early windows titles and most probably the controls in those games will be the arrows and you cannot change that there are lots of so-called browser games both old and new where you can not change the controls and the controls will be the arrows same goes with more than mobile games mobile games are so good nowadays that many players consider them serious titles but controlling them with on-screen touch controls isn’t usually a good experience that’s why many serious mobile games connect real actual hardware peripherals to their tablets and smartphones or use pc emulators with real keyboards and mice to play those games since those games are not designed to be used with a keyboard they also often default to the arrow keys for controls so in all those cases these keyboards actually try to help you by having a feature to swap the arrows with wsd keys so you can control your game characters the way you are used to well why does this keyboard activate this feature on its own then well actually it did not activate on its own you did that you see most gaming accessories keyboards included come from chinese brands both well-known and somewhat more expensive keyboards come from chinese brands as well as cheaper products from some obscure brands they are also made in china the letter cheaper ones despite being made of different shape and materials despite of the mechanical or rubber dome or mechanical film membrane switches used despite the number of keys despite the white monochrome or full rgb backlighting or lack of it all seem to be using the same logic controller inside so basically there are clones of each other some of them really look the same and the only difference is the branding others may look different but they still use the same controller at least the wired usb varieties and actually that’s how i discovered that combination the keyboard i use myself is a compact chinese mechanical one with rgb backlight the instruction manual does not mention how you can swap wsd and arrow keys even though you can this deluxe titan keyboard has this feature but doesn’t mention it in the instruction it doesn’t even have an instruction manual this basically the same keyboard under another brand has a manual but doesn’t mention the key combination eventually i found this keyword online which doesn’t even have that gaming aesthetics it looks like a office multimedia keyboard and yet it mentions the exact combination of function w to switch between wasd and arrow modes so it all comes down to this fn function key this is a very special key which works in the keyboard internally the signal from this key is not sent to the computer that’s why reinstalling keyboard drivers won’t help there is only one exception somewhat and these are laptops more often than not laptop keyboards come with much fewer keys than a standard full size one and they have this function key which you can press in combination with other keys to replicate the missing ones and very often the function keys that is f1 f2 f3 and so on also duplicate as the media keys which you can use to start and stop media player control volume skip tracks and so on these so-called media keys were introduced in mid-90s but back in mid-90s no one was actually listening to music let alone watching videos on their computers the only exception will be listening to cds but in that case you didn’t even need any kind of software because most pc cd-rom players of the day had a self-contained music player they were connected directly to the line input of your sound card which was basically an amplified pass-through to the speakers or you could plug your headphones directly into the cd-rom and most pc cd-rom players had a special play button on the front panel which you could press to start and stop the music using your pc to listen to the music started to become a thing in the late 90s due to the popularity of their new mp3 file format and the associated music piracy scene that’s where the things really started off and having dedicated keys on your keyboard to control the media player while you’re doing something else without the need to actually switch to that player was a really neat feature so keyboards started to come with special media buttons which you could use to control the playback the volume and also start additional programs like a browser and an email client app and many laptops throughout the entire 2000s had those dedicated media play buttons somewhere on their case but later on these separate media keys started to disappear and today mostly you have those media play buttons volume control etc on the f1 f2 3 4 and other f buttons and to use them you have to hold fn and press one of the f buttons builds settings of most laptops allow you to switch the behavior of these buttons so you can either have them act as media buttons by default and to use the f keys you will hold fn or vice versa so the default behavior will be f keys and if you need the media features you have to hold fn basically if you are an administrator or a coder you would want the buttons to act like fn by default and if you are a casual user who mostly consumes content as opposed to producers content you would probably want those keys to be media keys by default and the same is true with desktop keyboards some of the larger one still have those dedicated separate media keys but most will use the same f keys as duplicate for the media buttons and to access media features you will have to hold fn and press one of the f keys and that’s probably exactly what happened when you accidentally pressed fn and w and the arrow keys got swapped with the wsd keys most probably you wanted to adjust the volume in your game by pressing fn and f4 or f5 to lower or rise the volume or maybe you wanted to skip a track in your background music player all of that is used using the fn key and if you were controlling your character while doing that you may as well have pressed the w key which swapped the arrow keys with the wsd keys that’s what happened there is a valid argument that using the w key in this combination is somewhat stupid that’s why some keyboards use another hotkey to swap those keys around and that will be fn plus left arrow some keyboards use both you have to press fn then press w and arrow up some keywords use fn and left ctrl another popular combination to achieve the same effect is function and tab key and sometimes there is a dedicated button to swap those keys some keyboards have an office button which switches the keyboard from gaming mode to office mode and back usually this key has a legend of two arrows pointing in different directions almost like the tab key but it’s a separate key try not to confuse this office mode key on a chinese gaming keyboard with an official microsoft office key which some keyboards have nowadays so these are the most popular combinations to switch arrow keys with wasd keys and back sometimes not only these keys are swapped but also numeric keys may be swapped so one two three four five becomes six seven eight nine zero and vice versa and also these keyboards seem to have other functions like locking the windows key that is also a feature to prevent you from going back from your game to desktop if you accidentally press the windows key so to lock and unlock windows key you hold fn and press the left windows key usually it also has a little lock symbol on the keycap on some keyboards locking windows key will switch the keyboard into hotkey mode so pressing the letter s in windows will open the screencast projector menu for the monitor and in some rarer cases pressing fn and q will increase the sensitivity of wasd keys for games most of information about the hotkeys of your keyboard should be obtained from the instruction backlit that came with the keyboard or from the online manual if only most chinese keyboards had one and the information there was 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