Mathematica might be one of the few remaining holdouts of this convention: Return starts a new line, while Enter submits the command to the REPL. Enter is aliased to Shift+Return, though, which I'm pretty sure is what most people use nowadays.
I miss this so much in chats, even right now when typing this comment. It's too bad that return and enter ended up being the same thing in most applications.
slack very helpfully reverses the order when u are in format-as-code (triple backticks) mode, giving you the worst of both worlds: it's usually enter to send, AND you can get confused about which is which!
(there's a preference to turn this off but then I forget if I've turned it off...as with most things, discord does this better & simply prohibits sending when u are inside an unclosed code block)
Slack and chatgpt behaviors here are regular reminders to me of "using tech still sucks for the [non-nerds]". I'm pretty resilient to these whoopsies and just live with it...
Teams does the discord thing mentioned in another comment, helpfully! But I swear getting into code/format blocks in Teams only works sometimes (phase of the moon?)
My company's internal GPT changes the ChatGPT enter behavior, which I definitely appreciated the forethought of.
It's a user setting; I'm reasonably sure the default is as the previous poster described it, because I remember having to change it when a new account was set up for me last month (could be mistaken, but reasonably sure-ish I'm not).
I'd be interested in knowing where that's set up - I'm a member of a large number of Slack Servers from various groups, people, companies - going back to 2017.
Yeah, this brought me back to the days of AIM and constantly having a "3" at the end of my messages (and people asking why) because I was pressing the Enter key on the numpad to send my messages (and sometimes accidentally hitting the 3), rather than the Return key which would add a newline into my message! The distinction was actually a good thing, looking back. Can't even guess how many messages I've erroneously sent in recent years when actually trying to jump to a new line in the text I'm drafting...
It's really bad in the default ChatGPT 4o app: I keep posting by mistake my "question" although it's not done yet, so I get non-sensical and slow babbling which I have to interrupt.
Yeah, wish I could still assign it to different hardware keys instead of it being relegated to an implementation detail that differs depending on what application I happen to be using or even which field I have highlighted in a particular application. It's maddening.
He was right to do so. Give people an easy way out of designing for a new interface and they won't design for it. It's the same reason why they didn't do a stylus for iPhones and iPads early on. If they had, the overwhelming "touch" design language would have favored small stylus size targets instead of large finger sized ones. Similarly, when they shipped USB on the iMacs, that was the only peripheral port for the first 2 versions. And when they finally added more than USB, it was to add the new Firewire, not to add any legacy ports back.
Would the Wii have done as well with motion controlled games if defaulting to a playstation style controller was doable out of the box? How many pieces of old software and technology stay around despite better modern replacements because defaulting to the familiar original is easier?
Not everything new is obviously better, and new doesn't mean it should necessarily replace what came before. But new needs dedication to giving it a fair shake, and sometimes that requires going all in on the new and making going back to the old difficult.
And in response, a market for numeric keypads with arrow keys was born.
You can focus on the one thing that aggravates you, or your can focus on everything that he got done during the arc of his career. Like it or not, he helped define today's world of computing.
The Apple UX isn't much better than the often criticized Linux UX. In fact, sometimes it is worse (maximizing windows comes to mind). An opinionated system can be ok if the designer's opinion happens to match yours. Otherwise it can cause frustration.
I didn’t read it that way at all. If the keyboard without arrow keys had succeeded in setting the norm that developers rely on the mouse for input, then presumably it had done its job, and it was now safe to release a keyboard with arrow keys.
One also wonders WTF Apple has against Delete keys. It's infuriating. Mac laptops and small Apple keyboards have only a Backspace key mislabeled "delete," and no real Delete key.
And, despite years of complaints, Apple pettily refused to address this even when physical media became obsolete and freed up the Eject key. They made this into... a baffling "lock" key or something if I remember correctly.
And even worse... when Eject existed, Apple put a HARDWARE delay on it; so you couldn't even remap it to be Delete. Why impose an insurmountable delay on an Eject key? Were people being killed by accidentally-ejected CDs? And if so, why didn't Apple simply make Eject a Delete key, with Eject being a secondary function accessible only with a modifier key... solving two problems at once?
Two hands to delete a character is NOT nice. Why on earth would you want that?
Nor is this combo marked on the keyboard, so most people don't know about it. They end up arrowing across characters and then backspacing them away, or using the mouse for everything.
And finally: The point about the Eject key stands.
It comes up most often when I'm updating a string. I may want to backspace a couple characters and then, possibly after entering new characters, delete the other direction. I'm already using multiple hands/keys constantly so no big deal. Keeps the theme of removing characters on the same key.
Yeah. And if Apple design was so great, then why didn't we have separate copy+cut+paste keys, and undo+redo keys from the start? For example. Or even a help key.
I'd love this in modern UIs, I've got several apps where return is submitting a multiline textbox with shift-return adding a line, but then a few more that flip it the opposite way around... It's tough to recall which is which and therefore you end up submitting prematurely far too often!
In MS Excel, adding a new line within a cell is Alt+Enter. In LibreOffice Calc, the same is Ctrl+Enter. It’s like the LibreOffice (or probably StarOffice/OpenOffice teams before that) wanted some kind of vengeance on Excel users.
That never occurred to me, but sounds wonderful! I wonder if modern interfaces would have ended up more navigable if there had been the expectation of these dedicated keys on every keyboard?
What's interesting is "Enter", at the time, wasn't really a standard key at all. The key was called "return" on most keyboards, including seminal ones like the Apple II and VT-100. The IBM Model F that shipped with the original PC just had a "down and right" L-shaped arrow[1] on the key. A quick search pulled up the later F that shipped with the PC/AT, which had both the arrow and "Enter" printed on it. I think this is the first point where the industry shifted.
Now everyone but Apple uses "Enter".
[1] Chromebooks today have revived this tradition and have arrow-only enter keys.
Return, short for Carriage Return, makes no contextual sense unless you're old (really old) enough to have seriously used typewriters.
You don't have to be all that old. I had a job in 1995 where I was the only person in the building with a computer, while everyone else (30ish people) had typewriters.
People like to believe the computer revolution happened overnight. It didn't. Businesses didn't suddenly throw away all of their equipment and employees in one day.
1995 was 29 years ago, so those 30-ish people will be in their 50s or 60s, maybe even 70s by now.
So, "really" old by practical standards.
Incidentally, I'm 35 years old and I know how to handle a typewriter thanks to my late mother. Even in this day and age, some things are done quicker and easier by just busting out a typewriter out of the closet.
People are not used to the classic old meaning of "Enter key", because people are more used to PC keyboards and there is a common misconception of what "Enter" means.
On IBM PC keyboards, the key had got overloaded with two functions: Return and Enter.
From the IBM Model F AT forwards, the key typically carried a legend for each function: an angled arrow that means "Return", and the textual legend "Enter".
IBM keyboards for non-PC platforms, such as Model M keyboards for terminals had separate Return and Enter keys. The Return key had only the arrow. The "Enter" key was a small key on the bottom row.
BTW. There is also a similar common misconception for the Tab and Back-Tab symbols, which IBM terminal keyboards sometimes also had separate keys for.
Modern full-sized Apple keyboards still have separate Return and Enter keys. The key above right-shift is labeled Return, and the one in the numpad is labeled Enter. Unfortunately, the number of applications that still understand the distinction is ever dwindling.
This is a distinction that mattered quite a bit more in the 80s, and still matters today in limited application. While the comment in that is correct (return for multiline, and enter for selecting default option) a key feature for the macintosh, and any computer of the era, would have been being used as a terminal emulator (console for a mainframe or server of some sort).
On line based serial consoles, like interacting with a PDP or VAX (common in the era), you would be emulating a teletype. Return is short for "carriage return", physically moving the cursor to the head of the next line. In use cases such as that, enter doesn't matter as much.
However, on many IBM computers, where the UI is form based (not line by line serial as many expect): return is for new lines only or moving to the next form field, and enter is for submitting the whole form as is.
You still see return vs enter on modern keyboards, usually in the numpad area.
TLDR: it was probably considered a necessary function key for interacting with non-macintosh computers, a substantial use-case in the 80s
Many spreadsheets treated [RETURN] and [ENTER] differently.
I had one spreadsheet program that would move the cursor down one row on [RETURN], while [ENTER] performed the calculation (and recalculated any associated cells).
Another spreadsheet program used [RETURN] for a newline, and [ENTER] would recalculate the entire spreadsheet.
Upon seeing the picture, "one for 0D, the other for the 0A" was what came to mind, and then I remembered old Macs had what may be the rarest of the common newline representations - a single 0D.
I grew up with a 6128 keyboard (the keyboard was ackshually the computer) which had separate Enter and Return keys. It also had a "Copy" key. The keyboard I use today has a key to change the colour of the LEDs. If I press it accidentally I have to press it 7 more times to cycle around to match the mouse which has its own button and the same 8 colours.
Assuming both devices index the palette identically then accidentally pressing the button on the keyboard once should only require a single click on the mouse to make them match again.
Even if we've lost the separate enter key, at least we still have separate Meta and Control keys (Meta/CMD for keyboard shortcuts, CTRL for terminal control codes)...
