It seems that on the TI-83 family of calculators and some early TI-84s, the F1 through F5 keys are not used. In the documentation, they are referred to as soft keys, which to me, indicates that they are assignable from inside a program. However, I've not located any information on how to do that. I am wondering if anyone here has experience in accessing or using those keys?

Thank you!

Cheers!

I think the documentation could be referring to the fact that many official TI apps use the F1-F5 keys for navigation. To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to "assign" these keys to do anything they're not programmed to do.

Also, with later 84 OS versions pressing [alpha] followed by an F1-F5 key brings up a menu of commonly used functions, which I've found are often more convenient than navigating through the normal menus.

Hope this helps!

Thanks, it does help.

Well, in a basic program, you can always check for the keycodes (11 through 15) with the getKey command as you would any other keycode.
In an ASM program, you can use the GetCSC BCALL to look for those keypresses.
As for changing what the keys do in the OS (outside of a program), you can do it by creating a keyhook that calls your own code when the desired key is pressed.

That's a great idea - thank you.
Cheers!