alt Hacker NewsFTA: 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.
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My 2013 MBP says `enter` above `return` ... Presumably shift is the modifier (I never use it).
On 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?
On 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.
I 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?