Enter and Return?
QI follow many of your tips and find them very useful. Over the couple of years that I’ve been a reader I’ve noticed that you usually tell us to press Enter instead of Return. But sometimes it is vice versa. Occasionally, I press Return instead of Enter, because that key is bigger and closest to the QWERTY keys (on my keyboard, while Enter is to the righthand side of the numeric pad). Doing this has never caused me any bother, but I wonder why you tend to say ‘press Enter’ more than you say ‘press Return’? Is there any technical difference between these keys? Craig Pritchard
AThere is a difference, yes – but it’s more of a technical distinction than practical. To explain, it’s useful to understand the history of these keys. Return is short for ‘carriage return’, and is a hangover from typewriters: on those ancient mechanical devices, a flick of a physical lever would nudge the paper up and return the typing carriage to the left-hand side of the platen.
Later, on electronic typewriters, a button did the same thing.
Computers obviously don’t need this mechanism. Conceptually, information is ‘entered’ into a computer. For the sake of familiarity, though, some early computers – most notably, Apple Macs – kept the idea of carriage return, with a Return key. But PC keyboards embraced ‘entering’ information, with an Enter key.
Does all this matter today? Not really. Most full-size PC keyboards now have a main Enter key (often labelled with a new-line symbol, rather than the word) and second Enter key (pictured).
At the technical level, this second Enter key – normally next to the numeric pad, as on yours – generates a different ‘scan code’ for the computer. So, the computer does know which of the two keys has been hit.
However, because the vast majority of modern software treats these differing scan codes as the same input, it usually doesn’t matter which of the two keys you hit.
Finally, on the odd occasion we write ‘Return’, it’s just old habits dying hard!
Want to know the difference between technical terms? Email noproblem@ computeractive.co.uk