Comment by layer8
11 hours ago
Decades ago, Return and Enter were two different keys for that reason: Return to insert a line break, Enter to submit your input.
Given the reduction to a single key, the traditional GUI rule is that Enter in a multiline/multi-paragraph input doesn’t submit like it does in other contexts, but inserts a line break (or paragraph break), while Ctrl+Enter submits.
Chat apps, where single-paragraph content is the typical case, tend to reverse this. Good apps make this configurable.
Before that, page-mode terminals used <Return> to move to first field on a subsequent line (like a line-based <Tab>) and sent the page only on <Enter> or <Fn-key>. This made for quick navigation w/ zero ambiguity.
Microsoft teams: not as bad as people say, except for this situation.
I have accidentally sent so many messages trying to get to a new line.
Carriage return and line feed go way back. Tty stands for teletype. A computer was the job description of a person.
It’s turtles all the way down.
What lower turtles were there? My impression was that teletypes were the first proper keyboard-based interfaces.
The telegraph was keybased - only one key so I can't call it a keyboard, but in other ways it is what you are asking about.
don't get me started on backspace vs delete...
not just that ... plenty of web apps (and maybe desktop native ones too, though I don't notice it as much there) use "smart-delete" - if the cursor has a character after it, the delete key deletes it, but if not, it operates like backspace (which ought to be labelled "delete prev").
I haven’t happened to have seen that - which web apps do it?
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^H^H^H^H^?^?^?
That evil laughter from a disobedient tty. :(