alt Hacker News>> The prompt starts at the first field and <RETURN> (not <TAB> !) moves to the next.
This is hilarious to me, because times have certainly changed.
When we first started shipping Windows software the big complaint from users was the use of Tab to switch fields, while Return triggered the default button (usually Save or Close).
The change, for users used to DOS was painful - not least when capturing numbers as the numeric key pad has Enter not Tab.
Software developers either stood firm, convincing customers to learn Tab, or caved and aliased the Enter key to the Tab key. Even today I still find that option here and there in Software that's been around a while...
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We had a contractor write a replacement for some green-screen software that we ran for years. The replacement was of course a web interface, written in PHP, and nicely themed and all that was great in 2005.
We kept running into all kinds of weird issues when importing data back into the legacy system. Of course, after we started looking into it, I narrowed all the issues down to the same two users.
I don't remember exactly what it was, but users would hit a certain key on the keyboard at the end of every field, before they used the mouse to click on the next field and enter more data. This resulted in an undesired character at the end of every field!
I realized exactly what was going on as I watched a person fill out the form and submit it.
"Why are you doing that!"
"Doing what?"
"Hitting the space bar (or whatever key it was) every time you fill out a field!"
shrug
Author here, and thanks for reading. I'm glad to hear stories from a developer POV about those days. It's interesting uncovering subtle interface changes as I investigate various applications. It makes sense to me to not use Return for fields, especially when fields could gradually accommodate longer and longer blocks of text. Being able to naturally type multiple paragraphs, say for a "Notes" field in a database, would make sense.
> not least when capturing numbers as the numeric key pad has Enter not Tab.
And “Enter” isn’t “Return”.
I don’t know how the PC and PC software did it, but the Mac, when it got a numeric keypad, discriminated between return (on the alphanumeric keyboard) and enter (on the keypad), and software did discriminate between the two.