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The day Return became Enter (2023)

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Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#71

Post by iamflimflam1 »

unwind wrote: post #68
wpm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, throwback to running MacScheme (I think) on the university's Macs in a computer lab in the mid-90s. It interpreted main keyboard Return differently from numpad Enter, which to me (coming from the Amiga) was very confusing. If I recall correctly, only Return caused an evaluation attempt, while Enter merely added a line break for readability.

That would be incredibly handy for chat bots - the number of times I’ve accidentally hit return and then has to interrupt the bot so I can finish typing…

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#75

Post by rswail »

fecal_henge wrote: post #63
rswail wrote: 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…

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.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#76

Post by opan »

weinzierl wrote: post #55

We had distinct keys for Enter and Return for the longest time. An ISO standard keyboard has Return in the main block and Enter in the numpad. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enter_key#/media/File%3AEnte...

Enter and Numpad Enter are still distinct in QMK, and possibly some video game keybinds (just as numrow and numpad numbers can be recognized separately). Comparable to the left/right versions of ctrl, alt, super, and shift, I suppose. Fuctionally equivalent usually but can be differentiated, like a hypervisor using right alt to unfocus input.

I wonder if the labels on your linked keyboard really mean much. It could be like how Apple calls their backspace key delete, and has their own names for some of the modifiers.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#77

Post by ochrist »

Really interesting to read. I have used a lot of strange systems in my time. In the military signals group I have worked a lot with teletypewriter systems and the like - also the civilian telex system and the Aeronautical Fixed Telecommunication Network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronautical_Fixed_Telecommuni...

One thing the article doesn't mention is that some of the old teletypewriters were so slow that you could not be guaranteed that you would get the carriage to the start of the line by using only one Enter character, so it was mandatory to use two.

This meant that all linefeeds consisted of the following characters: CR CR LF (two carriage returns followed by one linefeed). Even in the time where most of the equipment were modern and didn't really need this, you couldn't know if somebody somewhere still had an old teletype running. So this was mandatory and part of the standard.

On mainframes there is also a distinction between Return and Enter. As far as I remember there was a soft return, which only moved the cursor down. And there was a hard return, which acted as Send - thereby transmitting your screen to the mainframe.

Something similar can be used on modern computers. Here is an example in Excel: If you edit a cell (with F2) you can end the edit by using Enter. But if you have enabled to wrap text you can use Alt+Enter to just input a linefeed without exiting the editor.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#78

Post by rswail »

Animats wrote: post #69
rswail wrote: 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…

> 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. No, it's not. That stuff is left over from 1940s-1950s schemes for polled multidrop teletype machines - multiple stations on one wire, taking turns. The idea was that you punched paper tapes locally and then put them into a reader. When it was…

Why? The use of TTYs for computing interfaces is very different to using them as teletypes on comms links.

I thought the control characters for that sort of use were the DC1-4 characters?

RS-485 uses polling but my understanding is that the characters for polling usually involve like "FF" (hex) and some sort of device ID.

I just read a TTY model 28 manual about the stunt box and I didn't see anything specific about FS/GS/RS there.

How were messages delimited in the polled multidrop environment?

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#79

Post by opan »

k__ wrote: post #72

How come the enter key is so small on most qwerty keyboards I've used and so big on the qwertz ones?

ANSI vs ISO, there's qwerty ISO as well. There was a bigger enter key on older ANSI keyboards as well, they just shrank it at some point. Or so I thought. The backwards L key I had in mind is apparently a mix of the two. I just associate it with older keyboards.

https://superuser.com/a/1368499

Personally I use a Pinky4 keyboard where every key is 1U these days, even space and enter.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#80

Post by opan »

vmladenov wrote: post #28
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.

On Windows you can rename with F2, and on macOS, Command-Down will work like enter does on Windows (I think of it like going down a directory, since up does the opposite, though it also will launch a file).
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