The day Return became Enter (2023)

It'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.

We 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%3AEnte...

What 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.

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.

I 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.

The 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.

To 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.

When the essay says "a literal tooth", does it really mean a literal calcium tooth from some animal's mouth?

Technically 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.

Older (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.

FTA: 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.

On 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.

Keys are often replaceable; and we can put our own labels on them.

Why not “Sure”?

Good 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.

I agree. Separate keys would be better.

I wonder if hat word processors would have used a separate Enter (or Go!) for?

I 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.