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.

• Animats

  today at 8:21 AM

  > 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.

  No, it's not.

  That stuff is left over from 1940s-1950s schemes for polled multidrop teletype machines - multiple stations on one wire, taking turns. The idea was that you punched paper tapes locally and then put them into a reader. When it was your station's turn, the central machine would send a polling sequence of a few characters, the selected reader would start up, read one message into the upstream system, then stop. In the other direction, the central station could send a turn-on code to any machine, print a message, then turn it off. Only one machine at a time could run. Those control characters were the delimiters for that process. All of this was mechanical, done by a unit called the "stunt box", which you can look up if really bored.

  RS-485 is a descendant of that technology, still used in some industrial control systems.

  (I used to restore antique Teletypes for fun, and had a functional Telegraph Office at steampunk conventions for about seven years.)

  • rswail

    today at 8:57 AM

    Why? The use of TTYs for computing interfaces is very different to using them as teletypes on comms links.

    I thought the control characters for that sort of use were the DC1-4 characters?

    RS-485 uses polling but my understanding is that the characters for polling usually involve like "FF" (hex) and some sort of device ID.

    I just read a TTY model 28 manual about the stunt box and I didn't see anything specific about FS/GS/RS there.

    How were messages delimited in the polled multidrop environment?

    • varjag

      today at 10:51 AM

      TTY interfaces initially were teletypes on comms links.

• arp242

  today at 12:06 PM

  Editing a file like that with a text editor is a right pain. Inserting these characters isn't all that straight-forward, and everything will be on a single line. In theory RS could be treated as a newline, which will only add to the line ending confusion.

  I think this is one of those things that sounds kind of nice in principle, but where the real-world practicalities just don't work out.

• Borg3

  today at 10:37 AM

  But we do NOT need to setup CRLF translation at all? Who in his sane mind uses CRLF even under windows? All my source codes are in UNIX format (aka LF only) and I use it consistent under Windows, Cygwin and UNIX.. Why make your life harder?

  • saghm

    today at 12:18 PM

    I think the issue is that people don't make their own lives harder, but sometimes they make the lives of other people harder (often unintentionally). In my experience, the CRLF files I run into tend to come from developers who are only working in Windows and either aren't aware of the issue or don't particularly care to do anything about it. It isn't something I run into often when cloning a git repo, but having recently started dabbling in the world of mod development for games, there's a lot of stuff out there that seemingly has never been touched by someone who's used Linux before. To be clear, I don't blame anyone for this, since people working on things for free in their spare time shouldn't have to worry about anything other than what interests them, but it's a bit amusing to me that I sometimes have less to configure to run an .exe on Linux without needing to configure anything than I do to start editing the source for it in a way that makes it easy for me to merge any new changes that happen upstream.

• paffdragon

  today at 7:58 AM

  Wouldn't we still need a "Line Separator" character so we can include line breaks in fields and records for formatting purposes?

  • rswail

    today at 8:23 AM

    RS separates logical "lines" or there is "Group Separator", but for internal line separators in a multi-line text field, the CR and LF characters could be used, because they have "standard" meanings for text:

    CR: move next character position to position 1 horizontally LF: move next character position to vertically below current character position, potentially inserting SP characters.

    So a combination of CR/LF, or LF/CR would have the effect of "New Line".

• fecal_henge

  today at 7:29 AM

  Also CSV files would not exist.

  • rswail

    today at 8:48 AM

    Comma Separated files would likely exist because they're human readable, whereas FS/GS/RS/CR/LF are not visible.

    There is "pipe delimited" which used "|" (ASCII 124 decimal) to separate fields, which actually makes way more sense, because that character is rarely used in normal text.

    It's also a good separator when a human is reading the file.

    • bonzini

      today at 9:22 AM

      They could be made visible. On MSDOS it was common to have editors show an arrow as ESC or EOF, respectively pointing left or right. A lone CR was a musical note.

      I am not sure whether RS could have replaced LF or CR+LF in this kind of free-format database; overloading record and line separators makes sense. But if FS-separated fields were a thing, people on MSDOS would have been used to seeing ⌙ as a field separator and likewise for other OSes.

> And the IBM PC – and later Microsoft Windows – went with Enter. (Actually, they first chose the ↵ arrow.

I'd claim that the article draws its own wrong conclusions.

The key was not renamed. On the IBM PC, the key got overloaded with two functions.

The IBM PC keyboard was preceded by larger keyboards with the same mechanism, style and font for use with IBM's terminals. Those had two separate keys for ↵ and Enter.

The ↵ symbol was the Return symbol signifying the Return function. The textual legend "Enter" signified the Enter function, for data entry.

Some early Model F XT keyboards did not have stabilised keys so the touch-area had to be 1×1 with room only for ↵. From the Mode F AT (large backwards-L key) forwards however, the key did have both legends: ↵ and Enter. From there on, "Enter" is mostly just what IBM PC users called it.

There are other common misconceptions about key legends. For example that ↹ would mean Tab, when it is two symbols: ⇥ for Tab and ⇤ for Back-Tab. Back-tab is on the top because it is activated with Shift. (And again, some IBM terminal keyboards had separate Tab and Back-Tab keys. Apple keyboards have only the ⇥ symbol, BTW.)

Really interesting to read. I have used a lot of strange systems in my time. In the military signals group I have worked a lot with teletypewriter systems and the like - also the civilian telex system and the Aeronautical Fixed Telecommunication Network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronautical_Fixed_Telecommuni...

One thing the article doesn't mention is that some of the old teletypewriters were so slow that you could not be guaranteed that you would get the carriage to the start of the line by using only one Enter character, so it was mandatory to use two.

This meant that all linefeeds consisted of the following characters: CR CR LF (two carriage returns followed by one linefeed). Even in the time where most of the equipment were modern and didn't really need this, you couldn't know if somebody somewhere still had an old teletype running. So this was mandatory and part of the standard.

On mainframes there is also a distinction between Return and Enter. As far as I remember there was a soft return, which only moved the cursor down. And there was a hard return, which acted as Send - thereby transmitting your screen to the mainframe.

Something similar can be used on modern computers. Here is an example in Excel: If you edit a cell (with F2) you can end the edit by using Enter. But if you have enabled to wrap text you can use Alt+Enter to just input a linefeed without exiting the editor.

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...

• layer8

  today at 11:36 AM

  The key in the main block was already labeled Enter on the original PC/AT keyboard and successors:

  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AT_keyboard_original...

  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_Model_M.png

  https://www.daskeyboard.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Cherry_k...

• opan

  today at 8:51 AM

  Enter and Numpad Enter are still distinct in QMK, and possibly some video game keybinds (just as numrow and numpad numbers can be recognized separately). Comparable to the left/right versions of ctrl, alt, super, and shift, I suppose. Fuctionally equivalent usually but can be differentiated, like a hypervisor using right alt to unfocus input.

  I wonder if the labels on your linked keyboard really mean much. It could be like how Apple calls their backspace key delete, and has their own names for some of the modifiers.

  • today at 9:26 AM

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.

• jama211

  today at 6:47 AM

  I wonder if I should make a joke menubar program where every time you make a newline while typing it sounds a slide-ding noise! I might do that…

  • i_am_proteus

    today at 9:29 AM

    The "ding" is a bell that is mechanically activated when the carriage gets close to the end of the writeable area (in many typewriters, this is a moveable stop to account for variable paper width).

    So when one types, the bell alerts the typist to the need to return the carriage; typically you get quite a few characters after the bell, either to finish your word, or hyphenate.

    Which makes it ding-slide rather than slide-ding :)

About 5 years ago I was teaching a college class how to format something and I said, "then you just hit return" and most of the class didn't know what "return" was.

> [Apple] added Control next to Command, ensuring decades of confusion.

When Apple introduced the Macintosh II, buyers had the option to get a keyboard with the Macintosh layout, or the larger Apple Extended Keyboard with a mixed Macintosh/IBM PC layout.

The Apple Extended Keyboard was intended to be used with a IBM PC in a card slot. That is why it has a layout like a IBM Model M with two Control keys. It also has some sublegends that are PC-specific and otherwise didn't make sense on Macintosh.

But this keyboard got popular, and influenced its successors.

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.

• wpm

  today at 4:55 AM

  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.

  • jasperry

    today at 12:21 PM

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

  • unwind

    today at 8:06 AM

    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.

    • iamflimflam1

      today at 8:28 AM

      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…

  • aldto

    today at 5:55 AM

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

    • jama211

      today at 6:48 AM

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

      • comex

        today at 7:30 AM

        This post has a few examples:

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

• kstrauser

  today at 3:32 AM

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

• weinzierl

  today at 6:12 AM

  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.

• hulitu

  today at 5:26 AM

  > 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.

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.

• Doxin

  today at 6:33 AM

  Perhaps a confused translation of escape/enter happening there? I don't think there's many (if any) PCs with both a return key and an enter key.

  • brianpan

    today at 6:52 AM

    My experience is with IBM AT and OS 2 which had a Return and a numpad with an Enter. The AT and Model M keyboard at least were part of a very popular and influential generation or two of "PC".

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard

    EDIT: Holy cow, those Model M pictures are so nostalgic.

  • kimixa

    today at 7:29 AM

    No, I definitely remember it behaving differently if I pressed "return" (right of "#" on the keyboard) vs "enter" (on the numpad).

    EDIT: In the US I guess that's right of "'"? Below backspace, above the right shift.

    The reason I remember is it took me quite a while to actually run the damn thing :P

We need two keys, one for new line inside a MS Teams message, the other for sending the message

• pytness

  today at 10:21 AM

  We already have two keys, they are called Shift and Enter

  • sippeangelo

    today at 10:36 AM

    I think I have about a 50% success rate in typing a multiline message without accidentally sending it early, having to edit / copy and delete the message and finish typing it before the recipient has a chance to read it, confusing both me and them in the process.

    • xnorswap

      today at 11:49 AM

      A similar frustration / reason for getting it wrong sometimes: in slack, the behaviour of shift+enter entirely reverses if you're inside a multi-line code block. If you normally have enter to send and shift+enter to line break, then it'll do the opposite while inside a code block.

      This is useful if you're trying to type verbatim inside a block, it's less so if you have a strong muscle-memory to shift+enter and do so while in the code block and find yourself sending half a message.

      I also use a mixture of teams, discord and slack, and while slack does allow for customisations, I'd always rather get used to defaults to avoid having to configure on every machine I use.

      There isn't quite a consistent well agreed default for the behaviour across applications, and that too is a source of frustration.

      So I've taken to typing up any long messages in a PM to myself, and then copying that out to my intended target once I'm ready.

      • arp242

        today at 12:11 PM

        > in slack, the behaviour of shift+enter entirely reverses if you're inside a multi-line code block

        There's a setting to turn that off so it behaves consistently. Or there was last time I used Slack.

        • xnorswap

          today at 12:15 PM

          Indeed, it was browsing settings which made me realise the root cause of why I was accidentally sending so many messages.

          But changing settings on platforms which I need to use across different computers and accounts is also cause for frustration, so I try to adapt to the defaults, no matter how frustrating.

    • lelanthran

      today at 11:27 AM

      > I think I have about a 50% success rate in typing a multiline message without accidentally sending it early, having to edit / copy and delete the message and finish typing it before the recipient has a chance to read it, confusing both me and them in the process.

      That won't change if you had a different dedicated key for "move one line down but don't send `enter` keycode". You'd still accidentally hit `enter` due to muscle memory.

      After all, if you could get past muscle memory, you'd simply press Shift while hitting Enter.

    • pytness

      today at 10:42 AM

      Same but with editing a message on a browser and trying to delete a word with Ctrl+w

  • fedeb95

    today at 10:54 AM

    yes but you have to type sfhit+enter, while a single "new line key inside the message" would be better for the specific task.

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.

• vmladenov

  today at 5:11 AM

  It was one of the things I found amusing my first time using OS X after growing up on Windows. Enter would “enter” a folder or execute a program, while Return in Finder starts renaming the file.

  • opan

    today at 9:05 AM

    On Windows you can rename with F2, and on macOS, Command-Down will work like enter does on Windows (I think of it like going down a directory, since up does the opposite, though it also will launch a file).

• gyomu

  today at 3:36 AM

  As I understand it, "return" is a shorthand for "carriage return" - as on typewriters, going to a new line meant returning the carriage to its original (start of line) position.

  • rswail

    today at 6:29 AM

    Carriage return moved the paper (on typewriters before the IBM Ball) and moved the print head (the "ball" on an IBM typewriter, or the actual print head on TTYs and DECWriter equivalents) back to column 0.

    Line Feed moved the paper up one line, Form Feed moved the paper up by a "form length" or, in the case of chain printers, to the particular position on the chain that was synchronized with the perforations on the paper itself.

    The carriage return physical device on the typewriter combined moving the carriage (which could be done by hand) and the rolling of the paper up one line (which could also be done by hand) into one convenient motion.

    • bregma

      today at 10:25 AM

      > Carriage return moved the paper (on typewriters before the IBM Ball) and moved the print head (the "ball" on an IBM typewriter, or the actual print head on TTYs and DECWriter equivalents) back to column 0.

      Carriage return always returned the carriage to the far right. Neither the print ball (if there was one), the printwheel, nor the typebars moved. Linefeed rotated the platen.

      It's true the carriage return lever operated both the carriage and the platen. Manually operated with the left hand and pushed one level deep it would release the carriage lock and let you return the carriage to the right. Pushed a second level deep it would rotate the platen one, one and a half, or two lines depending on the setting.

  • esafak

    today at 4:04 AM

    Going to a new line is "line feed", hence the combo CR/LF.

    • flomo

      today at 5:56 AM

      Yeah, it kinda blew my mind when I figured out that DOS was actually correct in that way, and unix was 'cheating' by magically inserting CR into the terminal codes.

    • ArnoVW

      today at 6:14 AM

      I believe that it also has to do with the fact that at the time there no ‘screens’, only teletypers. So a new line is “return the carriage to the start” and “feed another line” (of paper) into the printer.

• wpm

  today at 5:44 AM

  You’re “returning” whatever text you typed to the program accepting input.

  • falcor84

    today at 5:51 AM

    That doesn't quite fit the regular usage of the word. When someone asks you a question, you don't "return", but rather "respond" or "reply" or perhaps "submit" your response.

    • userbinator

      today at 5:55 AM

      Some people will "revert", which doesn't help matters much either.

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.

• SoftTalker

  today at 2:24 AM

  And of course ASCII separates them, with LF (linefeed, sometimes called newline) and CR (carriage return, or just return) being two separate characters. Windows (and probably some other) text file conventions used CR+LF to end a line, while unix conventions used just LF (hence the alternate name of "newline").

  • chowells

    today at 2:33 AM

    In line printers, a line feed moves the paper forward one line. A carriage return moves the print head back to the start of a line. You can do interesting things by making them separate commands, like bold text (overstrike) or underlining, so they were independent commands for talking to a line printer.

    ASCII standardized on a character set containing control codes for line printers, so it included CR and LF separately. It's a bit weird that some terminals changed the semantics of those control codes, but I guess things never stay static in time.

    • rswail

      today at 6:38 AM

      Line printers (also "chain printers" from IBM) used "form feed" to move the paper to the next "form", which for the most part was moving the tractor fed paper to the line after the page perforations.

      The printers either kept track of the number of lines printed "so far", or, in the case of a chain printer, there was a literal chain (similar to an engine timing belt) that had a particular location that was supposed to be aligned with the paper perforation.

      Standard tractor feed paper had a printable area that was 132 monospaced characters wide (13.2") and 11" high. Tractor feed paper had the holes at a standard distance apart vertically and a standard margin to allow for the tractor holes and an area before printing, so that the paper could also have vertical perforations to remove the tractor feed paper after printing.

      Teletypes were 72 characters wide and 0.1" line height and used continuous paper rolls.

Gotta love how inconsistent this is. The classic username/password dialog box, traditionally the first thing you see when starting your computer, would already have to treat the Return in a nonstandard way.

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.

• reddalo

  today at 9:08 AM

  In Italian it's called "carrello", which mean cart. Cart makes more sense than carriage, IMO.

• adastra22

  today at 5:49 AM

  Why would wagon return make sense? I don’t see the connection. A carriage is something that holds things for transport. A wagon is specifically the wheeled thing that is pulled along. Typewriters aren’t wheeled transports.

  • Etheryte

    today at 5:53 AM

    It makes sense because it's the same word in Swedish, the distinction doesn't exist.

  • amszmidt

    today at 5:56 AM

    A carriage is a wagon that transports people, not "things", a carriage are also usually wheeled, just like wagons.

    In this case, one reason why "wagon return" might have made more sense is because there is a wagon that holds the platen of the typewriter.

    • 3036e4

      today at 7:30 AM

      I said "as much sense", not "more". I am just not used to a language that makes the distinction.

      Doesn't seem perfectly consistent in English either. When there is a "wagon train" in a Western movie it is often full of people in wagons. Seems like wagon vs carriage is a bit more complex than just if it carries people or not?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covered_wagon

    • adastra22

      today at 7:02 AM

      It is a standard engineering term, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_carriage

  • GLdRH

    today at 6:11 AM

    Carriage is another word for wagon (german Wagen, swedish vagn)

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

• rswail

  today at 6:32 AM

  There was a metal tooth that the shift lock engaged on the shift key below it, effectively "locking" the key carriage in place in the "shifted" position (caps lock for alphabetic characters, the "special" characters for the numerics).

  To release it, you either pressed the shift key down, or pressed the shift lock again to "unlock" the shift.

  No animals were harmed by the implementation of the tooth :)

  • rhizome

    today at 7:35 AM

    It's a latch.

• anotherhue

  today at 6:05 AM

  No those would be "literal canines", i.e. grammatical assistance dogs.

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.

• etbebl

  today at 1:21 AM

  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?

  • ochrist

    today at 9:10 AM

    I modern Word you can use Ctrl + Enter to create a page break.

  • dkga

    today at 2:49 AM

    I wouldn’t doubt it, the way some Mac keys are completely unintuitive.

• robinhouston

  today at 2:58 AM

  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?

  • littlecosmic

    today at 4:44 AM

    On my 16" M1 MacBook Pro both Return and Fn+Return edit the filename... does it work differently on yours?

    • robinhouston

      today at 10:58 AM

      No, it works like that on mine. How amazing that I never noticed!

      The habit of using Enter has been so ingrained for so many years that I never tried pressing Return before now. Has that always worked? I suspect that it didn’t at some point in the past, though it may be you have to go back a long way. Or perhaps I've been mistaken about this for decades and never realised…

• YZF

  today at 5:34 AM

  My 2013 MBP says `enter` above `return` ... Presumably shift is the modifier (I never use it).

• blahedo

  today at 3:57 AM

  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.

How come the enter key is so small on most qwerty keyboards I've used and so big on the qwertz ones?

• opan

  today at 9:01 AM

  ANSI vs ISO, there's qwerty ISO as well. There was a bigger enter key on older ANSI keyboards as well, they just shrank it at some point. Or so I thought. The backwards L key I had in mind is apparently a mix of the two. I just associate it with older keyboards.

  https://superuser.com/a/1368499

  Personally I use a Pinky4 keyboard where every key is 1U these days, even space and enter.

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.

• eternauta3k

  today at 5:02 AM

  If you want more of these jokes in the structure and flow of the text you should read Gödel Escher Bach.

• tomr_stargazer

  today at 2:51 AM

  I got lucky in a different spot:

  "Manual hy-

  phenation was not advised, either."

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

Why not “Sure”?

• IgorPartola

  today at 3:45 AM

  Make it so.

  Proceed.

  Engage.

  Take that!

  En Garde!

  Go!

  Blam!

  Start your engines!

  Yes.

  Forward.

  Eh, good enough.

  • wpm

    today at 4:57 AM

    Do it!

    https://youtu.be/K4eScf6TMaM

  • JdeBP

    today at 5:36 AM

    If you have an "Internet" keyboard, you already have a "Forward" key.

    • abhinavk

      today at 10:18 AM

      Or a 5-button mouse.

  • mbork_pl

    today at 6:23 AM

    Allons-y!

  • arduanika

    today at 4:38 AM

    Shibbit!

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.

TIL that Shift Lock used to exist. What a shame it doesn’t anymore.

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.

• rrr_oh_man

  today at 6:24 AM

  The Valley Virgins strike again

• IshKebab

  today at 6:27 AM

  Are you 12?

  • code_martial

    today at 6:36 AM

    My child is.