Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The day Return became Enter (2023)

aresluna.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 179 posts

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#21

Post by esafak »

gyomu wrote: post #17
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.

Going to a new line is "line feed", hence the combo CR/LF.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#23

Post by littlecosmic »

robinhouston wrote: post #12
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?

On my 16" M1 MacBook Pro both Return and Fn+Return edit the filename... does it work differently on yours?

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#24

Post by wpm »

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.

Every Apple keyboard, even the iPhone I’m typing this comment on, has had a Return key. Only the Num Pad has an Enter key on Apple’s keyboards.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#26

Post by eternauta3k »

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.

If you want more of these jokes in the structure and flow of the text you should read Gödel Escher Bach.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#27

Post by kimixa »

I remember back in the day I had a demo disc where one of the installers (I think it was Theme Park?) had a prompt of "Press return to quit, press enter to continue". And that confused single-digit-years me for a surprising amount of time, as there wasn't, to my mind, a real difference between the two keys.

Even then I assume it was really a troll as much as anything else.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#28

Post by vmladenov »

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.

It was one of the things I found amusing my first time using OS X after growing up on Windows. Enter would “enter” a folder or execute a program, while Return in Finder starts renaming the file.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#29

Post by 3036e4 »

Older (pre-1980 or so?) Swedish texts call it vagnretur. Literally a wagon (or carriage; Swedish has only a single word for those things) return. Guess English picked up the word carriage from French at some point and that word ended up being used for carriage return rather that wagon return that would have made as much sense to me, but that might sound weird to native speakers.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#30

Post by hulitu »

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.

> I guess there's no other symbol that would convey the meaning of Enter as well.

Just wait until UI mafia from Microsoft, Apple or Google find about this. They will come with a new symbol every 3 months.

Post reply on HN