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The day Return became Enter (2023)

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Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#101
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have two keys, they are called Shift and Enter

I think I have about a 50% success rate in typing a multiline message without accidentally sending it early, having to edit / copy and delete the message and finish typing it before the recipient has a chance to read it, confusing both me and them in the process.

A similar frustration / reason for getting it wrong sometimes: in slack, the behaviour of shift+enter entirely reverses if you're inside a multi-line code block. If you normally have enter to send and shift+enter to line break, then it'll do the opposite while inside a code block.

This is useful if you're trying to type verbatim inside a block, it's less so if you have a strong muscle-memory to shift+enter and do so while in the code block and find yourself sending half a message.

I also use a mixture of teams, discord and slack, and while slack does allow for customisations, I'd always rather get used to defaults to avoid having to configure on every machine I use.

There isn't quite a consistent well agreed default for the behaviour across applications, and that too is a source of frustration.

So I've taken to typing up any long messages in a PM to myself, and then copying that out to my intended target once I'm ready.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#102
post #49

It's a damn shame that the control characters for "Field Separator" (FS ASCII 28 decimal) and "Record Separator" (RS ASCII 30 decimal) weren't used instead of TAB and CR/LF. Then the whole CRLF vs CR vs LF for line endings in files would have been totally avoided, with CR returning the print-head/cursor to the left-most position (right-most on R-L languages) and LF literally moving the print-head/cursor down. The dri…

Editing a file like that with a text editor is a right pain. Inserting these characters isn't all that straight-forward, and everything will be on a single line. In theory RS could be treated as a newline, which will only add to the line ending confusion.

I think this is one of those things that sounds kind of nice in principle, but where the real-world practicalities just don't work out.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I have about a 50% success rate in typing a multiline message without accidentally sending it early, having to edit / copy and delete the message and finish typing it before the recipient has a chance to read it, confusing both me and them in the process.

A similar frustration / reason for getting it wrong sometimes: in slack, the behaviour of shift+enter entirely reverses if you're inside a multi-line code block. If you normally have enter to send and shift+enter to line break, then it'll do the opposite while inside a code block. This is useful if you're trying to type verbatim inside a block, it's less so if you have a strong muscle-memory to shift+enter and do so…

> in slack, the behaviour of shift+enter entirely reverses if you're inside a multi-line code block

There's a setting to turn that off so it behaves consistently. Or there was last time I used Slack.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#104
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar frustration / reason for getting it wrong sometimes: in slack, the behaviour of shift+enter entirely reverses if you're inside a multi-line code block. If you normally have enter to send and shift+enter to line break, then it'll do the opposite while inside a code block. This is useful if you're trying to type verbatim inside a block, it's less so if you have a strong muscle-memory to shift+enter and do so…

> in slack, the behaviour of shift+enter entirely reverses if you're inside a multi-line code block There's a setting to turn that off so it behaves consistently. Or there was last time I used Slack.

Indeed, it was browsing settings which made me realise the root cause of why I was accidentally sending so many messages.

But changing settings on platforms which I need to use across different computers and accounts is also cause for frustration, so I try to adapt to the defaults, no matter how frustrating.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#105
post #91
post #49

It's a damn shame that the control characters for "Field Separator" (FS ASCII 28 decimal) and "Record Separator" (RS ASCII 30 decimal) weren't used instead of TAB and CR/LF. Then the whole CRLF vs CR vs LF for line endings in files would have been totally avoided, with CR returning the print-head/cursor to the left-most position (right-most on R-L languages) and LF literally moving the print-head/cursor down. The dri…

But we do NOT need to setup CRLF translation at all? Who in his sane mind uses CRLF even under windows? All my source codes are in UNIX format (aka LF only) and I use it consistent under Windows, Cygwin and UNIX.. Why make your life harder?

I think the issue is that people don't make their own lives harder, but sometimes they make the lives of other people harder (often unintentionally). In my experience, the CRLF files I run into tend to come from developers who are only working in Windows and either aren't aware of the issue or don't particularly care to do anything about it. It isn't something I run into often when cloning a git repo, but having recently started dabbling in the world of mod development for games, there's a lot of stuff out there that seemingly has never been touched by someone who's used Linux before. To be clear, I don't blame anyone for this, since people working on things for free in their spare time shouldn't have to worry about anything other than what interests them, but it's a bit amusing to me that I sometimes have less to configure to run an .exe on Linux than I do to start editing the source for it in a way that makes it easy for me to merge any new changes that happen upstream.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#106
post #24
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.

oh, thanks for the fact check. I guess it's obvious which computing ecosystem I never touch :)

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#107
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.

Yes indeed - and yet both the carriage and the paper move in the opposite direction compared with that arrow!

(I guess the arrow's supposed to represents the movement of the cursor, not the paper/carriage.)

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#108
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also CSV files would not exist.

Comma Separated files would likely exist because they're human readable, whereas FS/GS/RS/CR/LF are not visible. There is "pipe delimited" which used "|" (ASCII 124 decimal) to separate fields, which actually makes way more sense, because that character is rarely used in normal text. It's also a good separator when a human is reading the file.

I prefer alt 1 (smiley face) as a field separator. It definitely is rarely used in text.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#110
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar frustration / reason for getting it wrong sometimes: in slack, the behaviour of shift+enter entirely reverses if you're inside a multi-line code block. If you normally have enter to send and shift+enter to line break, then it'll do the opposite while inside a code block. This is useful if you're trying to type verbatim inside a block, it's less so if you have a strong muscle-memory to shift+enter and do so…

> in slack, the behaviour of shift+enter entirely reverses if you're inside a multi-line code block There's a setting to turn that off so it behaves consistently. Or there was last time I used Slack.

Thanks!
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