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Comment by jasperry | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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…

Or Slack. Shift-Return for a new line, except if you're in a code block!

And Fn+Return can be used for Enter if the keyboard doesn't have a Num Pad, for the few Applications that use it.

Huh, TIL. I do wonder though what programs are looking so specifically for the exact Enter code.

This post has a few examples:

https://daringfireball.net/2020/07/return_and_enter

Good 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.

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

The 2023 MacBook Air I'm typing this on has a return key.

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.)

Same for me. It had the smell of professionalism. Even more than for an Enter key I longed for the luxury of four distinct cursor keys.

> I guess there's no other symbol that would convey the meaning of Enter as well.

Just wait until UI mafia from Microsoft, Apple or Google find about this. They will come with a new symbol every 3 months.

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