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The day Return became Enter (2023)

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Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#11

Post by tomr_stargazer »

bee_rider wrote: post #9

On my phone with 100% text size, I got a hyphen as follows: “Manual hyphenation was not ad- vised, either” It is a very common older model iPhone, so I wonder if they lined that up on purpose. Brilliant, if so. It isn’t a manual hyphen, it just so happens to hit there.

I got lucky in a different spot:

"Manual hy-

phenation was not advised, either."

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#12

Post by robinhouston »

Someone wrote: post #2

FTA: Apple also added Enter to the numeric keypad, although an Enter that almost exclusively did the same thing as Return. If applications followed the UI guidelines, Enter behaved like Return if enter didn’t make sense in the context and vice versa. Yes, that was mostly (when do you have UI to enter a multi-line text to be processed as a separate unit?) but when it mattered, return started a new line, and enter sent…

On a current Mac laptop, you can still press fn + return to get the effect of the Enter key.

The only thing I really use this for is renaming files in Finder: select a file and press Enter to edit the filename.

Are there any other apps in which it does something useful nowadays?

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#14

Post by userbinator »

To me, "return" implies a "go back" action (like "backspace"), which is the opposite of "enter", so naming the key the latter makes more sense. Plenty of TUIs used the arrow keys, Backspace, and Enter for navigation.

Also, the text is nicely readable but none of the images are viewable.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#15

Post by aag »

What a wonderful essay. I learned to type on a manual Underwood typewriter with a carriage return lever. I don't miss it, but there was something so satisfying about moving that lever and feeling the whole carriage move. It meant that I had typed another line, and had made progress. The thing I truly don't miss was not being able to afford a new ribbon, and having to move back over every character and type it again to make sure that it showed up because the ribbon was so dry. Or not being able to undo mistakes.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#16

Post by kstrauser »

jasperry wrote: post #5

I remember being mildly intrigued as a kid when I started seeing PCs with the Enter key where my C64 had Return. It's ironic that, though we haven't seen a Return key for a long time, the down-left arrow symbol still used on many keyboards represents the motion of a carriage return. I guess there's no other symbol that would convey the meaning of Enter as well.

The 2023 MacBook Air I'm typing this on has a return key.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#17

Post by gyomu »

userbinator wrote: post #14

To me, "return" implies a "go back" action (like "backspace"), which is the opposite of "enter", so naming the key the latter makes more sense. Plenty of TUIs used the arrow keys, Backspace, and Enter for navigation. Also, the text is nicely readable but none of the images are viewable.

As I understand it, "return" is a shorthand for "carriage return" - as on typewriters, going to a new line meant returning the carriage to its original (start of line) position.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#19

Post by blahedo »

Someone wrote: post #2

FTA: Apple also added Enter to the numeric keypad, although an Enter that almost exclusively did the same thing as Return. If applications followed the UI guidelines, Enter behaved like Return if enter didn’t make sense in the context and vice versa. Yes, that was mostly (when do you have UI to enter a multi-line text to be processed as a separate unit?) but when it mattered, return started a new line, and enter sent…

On at least some Macs well into the 2000s, I remember that if you had a dialog with a text field in it, Return would add a new line in the text field, but Enter would _always_ choose the button with the thick black bar around it (typically "OK"). There were also some websites where OmniWeb (remember OmniWeb?) would interpret the Enter key (but not Return) as "click the 'next' link on this page", which was great for paging through webcomic archives and the like.
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