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Comment by Sardtok | Hacker News Reader

Aaaah, he's got carriage return and enter mixed up. The whole reason for the symbol being an arrow returning to the beginning of the line, is because it's the return key. I love the Canadian enter symbol, an arrow pointing into a box.

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Enter appropriated the same “arrow returning” symbol long ago, and the key is colloquially known more often as Enter these days.

Yes, but he calls the enter key return and the return key enter.

No. He calls the big one Enter presumably in recognition that’s what people know it as (check how any cross-platform web app calls it), and the numpad one Return/Enter because that’s what it is collectively known as across all the platforms. This all makes sense to me. Since the keys on the photos don’t have labels, this feels better for a reader in 2026 than being overly pedantic.

Right, but if you're referring to Return as Enter, then there's no reason to refer to Enter as Return. The reason for the change is that people don't distinguish the two. If we're going to eliminate this distinction, we should do it properly!

(I've had blank looks from a few colleagues after suggesting they press the Return key (that being the term I used to refer to the Return key) - which makes me wonder what percentage of people even know that Return is the name of a key. Perhaps we should retire the term entirely.)

I would love for Apple to move from Return to Enter as the default label, indeed.

How would that work for all the software that distinguishes between them? The standard (see e.g. Mathematica) is for `return` to create a new line in a multi-line text field, and `enter` (`fn+return` on a keyboard without a dedicated key) to execute/evaluate/commit the field.

But Return and Enter are still functionally different keys on macOS. Return inserts a new line, Enter (and cmd-Return) submits forms (which works for Reddit comments, but not here for some reason).

AFAIK those are not different keys, it's the literal keyboard combination Cmd+Return that is interpreted as submission in those contexts. Ctrl often works just as well on Windows for that purpose as well.

Numpad Enter is definitely a distinct key though, but I've never seen it treated differently than Return (except for randomly not working in some contexts that accept Return)

Except in many apps Return submits forms and Shift+Return inserts a new line, and in many other places Return and Enter do the same thing, showing to me that those labels are already pretty meaningless. It feels like a transition a good design team could figure out, keeping the distinction for those who want it, but simplifying for the rest. I believe Windows calls these Enter and Numpad Enter, or something like that? That feels better to me.

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