3 ms·
What did IBM want? Arrow keys?
by bobomonkey 5mo ago
What did IBM want? Arrow keys?
- kstrauser 5mo agoEnter/return commonly used elsewhere.
- cosmotic 5mo agoWhat would be 'submit' then?
- CamperBob2 5mo agoEnter/return on the 'Submit' button, I suppose. The rationale may have been "Start at the beginning of the form, keep hitting Enter after filling in each field, and it will submit itself when you're done."
- drivers99 5mo agoSome terminal software would use a function key that would be labelled "Execute". You'd usually have a template to put over the function keys to tell you what does what.
- MrDOS 5mo agoI'd never really thought about it before, but Enter to advance to the next field field and Ctrl + Enter to submit the whole form (which is the typical keyboard shortcut for submitting the form while a multi-line text input control has focus) does have a certain appeal to it.
- bsimpson 5mo agoThe overloading of return to either send a message or add a newline has become really annoying since chat apps (and then now AI) have become popular. You have to keep a mental context of whether you need to hold shift before you press return. See also: every message I've ever sent that ended with I' because I fat-fingered the ' key while typing a contraction.
- tracker1 5mo agoShift+Enter will usually enter a newline in a message without triggering send... At least that's the convention used most of the time. No guarantees on specific applications, just my own experience with this.
- Joker_vD 5mo agoSome applications annoyingly use the opposite convention: Shift+Enter is what commits the entered text, while plain Enter inserts a newline.
- tracker1 5mo agoYeah, it's not always consistent... hell, google voice's sms in the web app will take shift+enter but fail and just submit half the time anyway.
- Joker_vD 5mo agoTerminal keyboards generally used to have two separate ENTER (submit the form to the mainframe) and RETURN (insert a line break) keys. I mean, even the original 101-key PC keyboard has them: the RETURN key above the right Shift, and the ENTER key of the numpad.
- raverbashing 5mo agoTo me that sounds like the way MacOS avoids Home/End with alternative solutions that kinda work but are not great (And yes I do miss those - with an external keyboard these get less painful but still don't work 100% like on a PC)
- Terr_ 5mo agoPossibly, OS/2 co-development started in 1985, which is the same year IBM released the a keyboard with arrow keys. Of course, that assumes it came from a place of corporate strategy rather than individual habit, which could have been learned from other older systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard