8 ms·
The day Return became Enter (2023)
- Someone 1y agoFTA: 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 entered text to be processed by the application. MPW shell was a (?the?) prime example. In its editor, Return started a new line, Enter executed the current selection or, if there was none, line.
- etbebl 1y agoI have a faint memory of Enter creating a page break rather than a newline on a school Mac when I was a kid. Maybe that was in AppleWorks?
- robinhouston 1y agoOn 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?
- littlecosmic 1y agoOn my 16" M1 MacBook Pro both Return and Fn+Return edit the filename... does it work differently on yours?
- robinhouston 1y agoNo, it works like that on mine. How amazing that I never noticed! The habit of using Enter has been so ingrained for so many years that I never tried pressing Return before now. Has that always worked? I suspect that it didn’t at some point in the past, though it may be you have to go back a long way. Or perhaps I've been mistaken about this for decades and never realised…
- blahedo 1y agoOn 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.
- YZF 1y agoMy 2013 MBP says `enter` above `return` ... Presumably shift is the modifier (I never use it).
- usr1106 1y agoTechnically the difference is clear. Return is for character based protocols, teletypes, ttys, VT100, ssh and the like. Enter is for IBM 3278 style where a "screenful" or form of inputs is buffered by the terminal and sent as a whole when the user presses enter or send. Fewer interrupts and context switches at the mainframe. Required even its own ssh client. Return key exists, too, and can be part of the buffered data record. In practice the enter term leaked into the character-based world.
- SoftTalker 1y agoAnd of course ASCII separates them, with LF (linefeed, sometimes called newline) and CR (carriage return, or just return) being two separate characters. Windows (and probably some other) text file conventions used CR+LF to end a line, while unix conventions used just LF (hence the alternate name of "newline").
- chowells 1y agoIn line printers, a line feed moves the paper forward one line. A carriage return moves the print head back to the start of a line. You can do interesting things by making them separate commands, like bold text (overstrike) or underlining, so they were independent commands for talking to a line printer. ASCII standardized on a character set containing control codes for line printers, so it included CR and LF separately. It's a bit weird that some terminals changed the semantics of those control codes, but I guess things never stay static in time.
- rswail 1y agoLine printers (also "chain printers" from IBM) used "form feed" to move the paper to the next "form", which for the most part was moving the tractor fed paper to the line after the page perforations. The printers either kept track of the number of lines printed "so far", or, in the case of a chain printer, there was a literal chain (similar to an engine timing belt) that had a particular location that was supposed to be aligned with the paper perforation. Standard tractor feed paper had a printable area that was 132 monospaced characters wide (13.2") and 11" high. Tractor feed paper had the holes at a standard distance apart vertically and a standard margin to allow for the tractor holes and an area before printing, so that the paper could also have vertical perforations to remove the tractor feed paper after printing. Teletypes were 72 characters wide and 0.1" line height and used continuous paper rolls.
- jasperry 1y agoI 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.
- kstrauser 1y agoThe 2023 MacBook Air I'm typing this on has a return key.
- wpm 1y agoEvery 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.
- aldto 1y agoAnd Fn+Return can be used for Enter if the keyboard doesn't have a Num Pad, for the few Applications that use it.
- jama211 1y agoHuh, TIL. I do wonder though what programs are looking so specifically for the exact Enter code.
- comex 1y agoThis post has a few examples: https://daringfireball.net/2020/07/return_and_enter https://daringfireball.net/2020/07/return_and_enter
- jama211 1y agoGood old daringfireball! Ah, of course it makes sense, things akin to the shift+enter for adding new lines in messages without executing them or vice versa. I should’ve known.
- layer8 1y agoThe first programmable device I owned was an HP scientific calculator, which had a big Enter key, the only key spanning the space of two regular keys on the device. A friend opined that you could tell that it was a real computer and not just a calculator by the presence of that key. It wasn’t true though, the Enter key was there for the HP’s RPN operation and wasn’t otherwise relevant to its programmability.
- bee_rider 1y agoOn 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.
- tomr_stargazer 1y agoI got lucky in a different spot: "Manual hy- phenation was not advised, either."
- eternauta3k 1y agoIf you want more of these jokes in the structure and flow of the text you should read Gödel Escher Bach.
- mproud 1y agoKeys are often replaceable; and we can put our own labels on them. Why not “Sure”?
- IgorPartola 1y agoMake it so. Proceed. Engage. Take that! En Garde! Go! Blam! Start your engines! Yes. Forward. Eh, good enough.
- mbork_pl 1y agoAllons-y!
- arduanika 1y agoShibbit!
- wpm 1y agoDo it! https://youtu.be/K4eScf6TMaM https://youtu.be/K4eScf6TMaM
- syncsynchalt 1y ago> Finally, the team noticed one user that was particularly flummoxed by the dialog box, who even seemed to be getting a bit angry. The moderator interrupted the test and asked him what the problem was. He replied, "I'm not a dolt, why is the software calling me a dolt?" https://www.folklore.org/Do_It.html https://www.folklore.org/Do_It.html
- JdeBP 1y agoIf you have an "Internet" keyboard, you already have a "Forward" key.
- abhinavk 1y agoOr a 5-button mouse.
- userbinator 1y agoTo 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.
- gyomu 1y agoAs 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.
- esafak 1y agoGoing to a new line is "line feed", hence the combo CR/LF.
- flomo 1y agoYeah, it kinda blew my mind when I figured out that DOS was actually correct in that way, and unix was 'cheating' by magically inserting CR into the terminal codes.
- ArnoVW 1y agoI believe that it also has to do with the fact that at the time there no ‘screens’, only teletypers. So a new line is “return the carriage to the start” and “feed another line” (of paper) into the printer.
- rswail 1y agoCarriage return moved the paper (on typewriters before the IBM Ball) and moved the print head (the "ball" on an IBM typewriter, or the actual print head on TTYs and DECWriter equivalents) back to column 0. Line Feed moved the paper up one line, Form Feed moved the paper up by a "form length" or, in the case of chain printers, to the particular position on the chain that was synchronized with the perforations on the paper itself. The carriage return physical device on the typewriter combined moving the carriage (which could be done by hand) and the rolling of the paper up one line (which could also be done by hand) into one convenient motion.
- aag 1y agoWhat 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.
- jama211 1y agoI wonder if I should make a joke menubar program where every time you make a newline while typing it sounds a slide-ding noise! I might do that…
- i_am_proteus 1y agoThe "ding" is a bell that is mechanically activated when the carriage gets close to the end of the writeable area (in many typewriters, this is a moveable stop to account for variable paper width). So when one types, the bell alerts the typist to the need to return the carriage; typically you get quite a few characters after the bell, either to finish your word, or hyphenate. Which makes it ding-slide rather than slide-ding :)
- j4_james 1y agoThis was also an option on many "Glass TTY" terminals - it was called the margin bell - and even some modern terminal emulators still have that option. The exact semantics vary, but it's usually triggered when entering content around 8 characters from the right margin.
- jama211 1y agoHahaha, good point, you know I knew that but just didn’t think it through. I’d still like to make it though…
- 1718627440 1y ago
- transfire 1y agoI agree. Separate keys would be better. I wonder if hat word processors would have used a separate Enter (or Go!) for?
- kimixa 1y agoI 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.
- Doxin 1y agoPerhaps a confused translation of escape/enter happening there? I don't think there's many (if any) PCs with both a return key and an enter key.
- brianpan 1y agoMy experience is with IBM AT and OS 2 which had a Return and a numpad with an Enter. The AT and Model M keyboard at least were part of a very popular and influential generation or two of "PC". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard EDIT: Holy cow, those Model M pictures are so nostalgic.
- kimixa 1y agoNo, I definitely remember it behaving differently if I pressed "return" (right of "#" on the keyboard) vs "enter" (on the numpad). EDIT: In the US I guess that's right of "'"? Below backspace, above the right shift. The reason I remember is it took me quite a while to actually run the damn thing :P
- 3036e4 1y agoOlder (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.
- adastra22 1y agoWhy would wagon return make sense? I don’t see the connection. A carriage is something that holds things for transport. A wagon is specifically the wheeled thing that is pulled along. Typewriters aren’t wheeled transports.
- Etheryte 1y agoIt makes sense because it's the same word in Swedish, the distinction doesn't exist.
- amszmidt 1y agoA carriage is a wagon that transports people, not "things", a carriage are also usually wheeled, just like wagons. In this case, one reason why "wagon return" might have made more sense is because there is a wagon that holds the platen of the typewriter.
- adastra22 1y agoIt is a standard engineering term, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_carriage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_carriage
- 3036e4 1y agoI said "as much sense", not "more". I am just not used to a language that makes the distinction. Doesn't seem perfectly consistent in English either. When there is a "wagon train" in a Western movie it is often full of people in wagons. Seems like wagon vs carriage is a bit more complex than just if it carries people or not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covered_wagon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covered_wagon
- strken 1y agoWhen the essay says "a literal tooth", does it really mean a literal calcium tooth from some animal's mouth?
- anotherhue 1y agoNo those would be "literal canines", i.e. grammatical assistance dogs.
- syncsynchalt 1y agoIn some industries, latches (which the article called "teeth") are called "dogs". So that's a full-circle kind of comment you've got there.
- rswail 1y agoThere was a metal tooth that the shift lock engaged on the shift key below it, effectively "locking" the key carriage in place in the "shifted" position (caps lock for alphabetic characters, the "special" characters for the numerics). To release it, you either pressed the shift key down, or pressed the shift lock again to "unlock" the shift. No animals were harmed by the implementation of the tooth :)
- rhizome 1y agoIt's a latch.
- code_martial 1y agoI was considering a purchase, seeing as it is such a wealth of information and history. However, there are expletives in chapter titles! That’s a no-no for a collection-worthy book.
- rrr_oh_man 1y agoThe Valley Virgins strike again
- IshKebab 1y agoAre you 12?
- code_martial 1y agoMy child is.
- rswail 1y agoIt'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 drivers for the particular terminal could have translated as required, and we would not need (in 2025!) to be specifying to git and elsewhere what to convert line endings to/from. I know that back in the days of literal TTYs (ASR-33) where I cut my teeth, the BEL/BS/SP/CR/LF/FF etc characters were literally controlling a print head, but even then it didn't make much sense that we didn't have internal representation of what was needed (field separator, group separator, record separator) that was translated when doing actual I/O to a physical device.
- fecal_henge 1y agoAlso CSV files would not exist.
- rswail 1y agoComma 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.
- bonzini 1y agoThey could be made visible. On MSDOS it was common to have editors show an arrow as ESC or EOF, respectively pointing left or right. A lone CR was a musical note. I am not sure whether RS could have replaced LF or CR+LF in this kind of free-format database; overloading record and line separators makes sense. But if FS-separated fields were a thing, people on MSDOS would have been used to seeing ⌙ as a field separator and likewise for other OSes.
- UltraSane 1y ago
- maxlin 1y agoGood read, I didn't realize how much diversity there was in those buttons. Thought it was just a few different options! in CR LF, the LF being there to account for timing as its tolerant of the return process still being in progress is genius.
- weinzierl 1y agoWe 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%3AEnter.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enter_key#/media/File%3AEnte...
- opan 1y agoEnter 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- LgWoodenBadger 1y agoBack in the last century, Mathematica was like this as well. On Macs, "return" wouldn't run the command you entered, you had to hit "enter" from the numpad. Shift-return may have worked as well, but it's been so long I couldn't say for sure. Edited: Mixed up Matlab and Mathematica
- layer8 1y agoThe key in the main block was already labeled Enter on the original PC/AT keyboard and successors: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AT_keyboard_original_layout.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AT_keyboard_original... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_Model_M.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_Model_M.png https://www.daskeyboard.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Cherry_keyboard.jpeg https://www.daskeyboard.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Cherry_k...
- bsimpson 1y agoAs a lifelong Mac user, that's my mental model of that key. It's still the layout Apple uses in the US: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MXK83LL/A/magic-keyboard-with-touch-id-and-numeric-keypad-for-mac-models-with-apple-silicon-usb-c-us-english-black-keys https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MXK83LL/A/magic-keyboard-...
- k__ 1y agoHow come the enter key is so small on most qwerty keyboards I've used and so big on the qwertz ones?
- opan 1y agoANSI 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 https://superuser.com/a/1368499 Personally I use a Pinky4 keyboard where every key is 1U these days, even space and enter.
- indyjo 1y agoGotta love how inconsistent this is. The classic username/password dialog box, traditionally the first thing you see when starting your computer, would already have to treat the Return in a nonstandard way.
- lloydatkinson 1y agoTIL that Shift Lock used to exist. What a shame it doesn’t anymore.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoGiven that you've got Caps Lock, what would be the use for Shift Lock? I can't imagine any mainstream use where you'd want to enter a long sequence of symbols (!@#$% etc) needing Shift, other than letters.
- ochrist 1y agoReally 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_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.
- ahazred8ta 1y agoSome systems enforced CR LF NUL NUL NUL
- fedeb95 1y agoWe need two keys, one for new line inside a MS Teams message, the other for sending the message
- pytness 1y agoWe already have two keys, they are called Shift and Enter
- sippeangelo 1y agoI 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.
- pytness 1y agoSame but with editing a message on a browser and trying to delete a word with Ctrl+w
- lelanthran 1y ago> 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. That won't change if you had a different dedicated key for "move one line down but don't send `enter` keycode". You'd still accidentally hit `enter` due to muscle memory. After all, if you could get past muscle memory, you'd simply press Shift while hitting Enter.
- xnorswap 1y agoA 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.
- jccalhoun 1y agoAbout 5 years ago I was teaching a college class how to format something and I said, "then you just hit return" and most of the class didn't know what "return" was.
- Findecanor 1y ago> And the IBM PC – and later Microsoft Windows – went with Enter. (Actually, they first chose the ↵ arrow. I'd claim that the article draws its own wrong conclusions. The key was not renamed. On the IBM PC, the key got overloaded with two functions. The IBM PC keyboard was preceded by larger keyboards with the same mechanism, style and font for use with IBM's terminals. Those had two separate keys for ↵ and Enter. The ↵ symbol was the Return symbol signifying the Return function. The textual legend "Enter" signified the Enter function, for data entry. Some early Model F XT keyboards did not have stabilised keys so the touch-area had to be 1×1 with room only for ↵. From the Mode F AT (large backwards-L key) forwards however, the key did have both legends: ↵ and Enter. From there on, "Enter" is mostly just what IBM PC users called it. There are other common misconceptions about key legends. For example that ↹ would mean Tab, when it is two symbols: ⇥ for Tab and ⇤ for Back-Tab. Back-tab is on the top because it is activated with Shift. (And again, some IBM terminal keyboards had separate Tab and Back-Tab keys. Apple keyboards have only the ⇥ symbol, BTW.)
- kps 1y agoSpeaking of overloading and Tab, piling on the ‘next field’ function is an endless source of pain.
- dfox 1y agoThat is not an overloading, that is just preserving the behavior of Tab on IBM terminals.
- Sharlin 1y ago"Next field" is sort of what tabulation means. Moving to the next column of a tabular form.
- kps 1y agoThat was the origin, but for everyday typing of non-tabular work, like letters, it was used for indenting paragraphs and address and signature blocks. And it always moved to the next tab stop to the right on the line. ASCII calls it HT, ‘Horizontal Tabulation’. Later, some systems, notably IBM's, overloaded this to move to the ‘next’ field on a form, which might be to the left and down the page. So from there MS-DOS/Windows stuck us with a Tab that sometimes moves horizontally within a text field, and sometimes moves to a different field. Just like Return sometimes moves to a new line/paragraph and sometimes submits a form.
- Findecanor 1y ago> [Apple] added Control next to Command, ensuring decades of confusion. When Apple introduced the Macintosh II, buyers had the option to get a keyboard with the Macintosh layout, or the larger Apple Extended Keyboard with a mixed Macintosh/IBM PC layout. The Apple Extended Keyboard was intended to be used with a IBM PC in a card slot. That is why it has a layout like a IBM Model M with two Control keys. It also has some sublegends that are PC-specific and otherwise didn't make sense on Macintosh. But this keyboard got popular, and influenced its successors.
- UltraSane 1y agoHis comment about how the ENTER key doing both newline and submitting data being confusing is very true. Gemini in AI Stuido and Claude handle this differently and it is so annoying.
- OhMeadhbh 1y agoI was a backer of the "Shift Happens" kickstarter and can confirm it has given me hours of enjoyment thinking about the way humans interact with their creations. This article is just a small fraction of the weirdness you find in keyboards over time. And I wonder if there's enough interest and content for narratives focused on joysticks or mice/trackballs/trackpads/nubs or game controllers or ... I was a little surprised the Space Cadet keyboard didn't come up, but I guess this is an article about the return/enter key and not various modifier keys.
- cwmma 1y agoTangentially related, but there is great paper tracking how the layout of the qwerty keyboard came to be, tracing the slow evolution of it from a two row keyboard with a-m on the top row and z-n on the bottom to what we have today. https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/server/api/core/bitstreams/dc434be9-80cd-499b-a984-f9fa35954c3b/content https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/server/api/core/bitst...
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoThe article illustrates an old 1930's Teletype model 15 with it's separate Carriage Return and Line Feed keys, and claims that these were kept separate (vs a single key/code that performed/represented CR + LF) so that sending the separate LF gave the receiving device enough time to mechanically perform the CR function. I wonder if this is quite correct? This Teletype use Baudot code, not ASCII, as reflected by the keyboard including LTRS and FIGS keys. Baudot was only a 5 bit code, so in order to be able to represent/transmit more characters than 5 bits would allow, it used the LTRS (letters) and FIGS (figures) codes to select different character sets (cf ASCII SI & SO), which the receiving system would then need to keep track of. Apparently the convention was to send the sequence "CR LF LTRS LTRS" to both advance to next line and select the letters character set, with sending the semantically redundant double "LTRS LTRS", giving the receiving teletype enough time to complete the preceding mechanical movements (CR, LF). Given this, it seems that keeping LF distinct from a combined CR+LF operation wasn't needed for timing considerations - one could have just sent as many LTRS as needed. I wonder was there perhaps a use case for LF without CR with the old Teletypes, or perhaps keeping them separate was just due to the simple mechanical nature of these devices and the different mechanical operations needed to perform CR vs LF ?
- kevindamm 1y agoI don't have additional historical context, but the reason that makes sense to me is that a LF can be repeated multiple times (e.g. for double-spaced lines, or for advancing to the next page) without needing to also issue a CR more than the initial time, since the carriage is already back to the beginning of the line.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoSure, but sending a hypothetical combined CR+LF code (cf modern interpretation of CR) multiple times would accomplish the same thing, assuming there was no downside to performing CR when already at the start of the line.
- kevindamm 1y ago
- jibal 1y agoNice history recap, most of which I lived through, but it's missing the Bill Gates/PCDOS botch of using CR and LF as the text line separator, a result of not doing a logical translation of the characters sent by the terminal. UNIX sort of did it right by just using LF, but it would have been better to use NUL as the terminator--then there wouldn't have been the need to strip off LF on input and add it back on output and we wouldn't have the special case, handled differently by numerous programs, of a file ending with a line lacking an LF terminator ... and there wouldn't be the numerous bugs and weird behavior resulting from lines containing NULs.
- chuckadams 1y agoUsing NUL as the terminator would have been incredibly incompatible with Unix's choice of systems programming language. PC-DOS did not invent CRLF as the line terminator, it was already in common use in CP/M and VMS at the time.
- jibal 1y agoNo, it would have been completely compatible with C ... that's the point.
- chuckadams 1y agoCompletely compatible, other than making most programs incapable of expressing multiple lines in one string that is. Or a partial line in a single string, since "end of line" and "end of string" would be indistinguishable.
- jibal 1y agoThis is conceptually confused. There are numerous ways to represent multiple lines in applications that want to operate on them, including separating them with LF, or any other code sequence ... but a better choice is using an array of pointers. As for partial lines, this is a matter of how one is semantically interpreting a string ... numerous C programs operate on lines with the LF stripped, and operate on all sorts of other strings, including substrings of lines. Anyway, it's moot since UNIX didn't take this approach. I won't respond further.
- jfultz 1y agoGrowing up in the 70s, among the things I sought out in our house to play with was an old manual typewriter. It was endlessly fascinating to me. I liked playing with all of the mechanical bits. Trying to jam keys, working the carriage return, scrolling paper through it, pressing the Shift key and looking to see how it moved the entire basket of typebars, overtyping to make new characters, watching how the ribbon advanced with each keystroke and rewinding it by hand, etc. One thing I had forgotten, which was mentioned in this article, was figuring out how to set tab stops, which allowed me to either stutter the carriage across, or make it fly free from one end to the other.
- Bjartr 1y agoSubtle clickbait. Promising "the day return became enter" to entice. It can be narrowed down to a single day, or at least close enough to a single event that way can pick an effective day? Was it a single product release? A single software release? I'll read the article to find out. > There was no day, no single event when Return became Enter Oh, never mind then... Could've just titled it "The history of how Return became Enter" or "How Return became Enter"
- qwertygnu 1y agoA lot of people talk like this too. I'm sure I'm a little too literal, but IMO most people are too clickbait-y.
- Pxtl 1y agoIt's funny how HTML p tags and instant messaging apps have kind of brought back the distinction between "return" and "enter" where generally "shift-enter" means simple line-break/return, while regular "enter" means "new paragraph" or "send message". Ive been finally learning a bit of Linux shell stuff and was disappointed when I realized that shells generally don't follow this paradigm unlike PowerShell consoles on Windows.
- 1718627440 1y agoYeah on the shell you need to type \ Enter
- ogab 1y agoI liked this article a lot because I’ve spent way too much time thinking about things like this, thanks to my mechanical keyboard and keycap hobby. That said, it misses a key ancestor: the original Macintosh Keyboard (M0110). It had a Return key AND an Enter key in the bottom row, to the right of the spacebar and next to the Option key. There was Command key on the left only, which seems to mark the evolution from the “Open Apple” and “Closed Apple” keys. If I recall correctly, Return was intended for typing, while Enter was used for GUI interaction, but I’m not entirely sure. Even into the 2000s, laptops were still figuring things out. I had a 12-inch PowerBook G4 with two keys labeled “Enter”: - One accessible via Fn + Return - One as its own key in the bottom row, next to the right Command key This layout meant it only had one Option key. It also featured a lockable numpad layer, so having a standalone Enter key made less sense to me. Unless it was meant for spreadsheet number crunchers? Or there was still that typing/GUI distinction in Mac OS 9 somewhere?
- bsimpson 1y agoHere's a photo of that keyboard: https://www.instructables.com/Apple-M0110-Keyboard-Crossover-Adapter/ https://www.instructables.com/Apple-M0110-Keyboard-Crossover...