Rocket chat [LWN.net]

Rocket chat

Posted Feb 27, 2026 15:31 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Rocket chat by taladar
Parent article: Open-source Discord alternatives

The trouble with using "Enter" to send a message is it is objectively bad by most measures. Primarily the "principle of least surprise".

Likewise "tab" is horribly abused,

Both come from typewriters, and are learnt by anyone using a word-processor - "enter" is even synonymous with "return" - and there are no obvious alternatives - unsurprisingly because these meanings are about 150 years old.

Then they got hijacked by web technology to mean other things, but it's the classic "muscle memory" problem - if the instinctive reaction actually does the wrong thing, then it's almost impossible to fix, and no - improved training is NOT a fix when the environment re-inforces the wrong behaviour.

If I'm used to using "return" to mean "return" then absolutely no amount of training will help me to learn that actually, "enter" really means "send"!

Cheers,
Wol

Rocket chat

Posted Feb 27, 2026 15:47 UTC (Fri) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (6 responses)

If I'm used to using "return" to mean "return" then absolutely no amount of training will help me to learn that actually, "enter" really means "send"!

Well, perhaps no amount of training will help you but this is something I got used to before the turn of the century. ;-)

If I recall correctly, "Enter to send" has been standard behavior for IRC clients and early chat platforms since at least the mid-90s. I'm always surprised when I have to do "Shift+Enter" to send a message. Fewer and fewer users have muscle memory from using typewriters or word processors. (That is, word processor devices, like the poor, overworked Brother WP that I used early in college...)

That said, it should ideally be configurable behavior in any well-designed client. Users should be able to set one or the other to suit their preferences.

Rocket chat

Posted Feb 27, 2026 17:09 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> (That is, word processor devices, like the poor, overworked Brother WP that I used early in college...)

Except that return/enter in word processors / text editors like Word, WP, Writer, vim, emacs et al still means return ...

And I probably use them a lot more than I use IRC/Chat/whatever. I think about the only time I use an app where "Enter" means "Send" is the work Slack client ...

Yes it is people-dependent, but for us old-schoolers, our daily grind still re-inforces "enter means return". :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Enter meaning send or return

Posted Feb 27, 2026 17:45 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

At least in the chat clients I use, bar IRC which is line-oriented anyway, I can configure them such that Enter means "new line, don't send yet", and I use Shift-Enter to send. I've done this to work's Slack client, because Enter is muscle memory for me when I finish a logical line, and Shift-Enter is not, so I don't accidentally send things when writing longer resposnes.

Rocket chat

Posted Mar 4, 2026 8:13 UTC (Wed) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (3 responses)

My muscle memory comes from Email and Usenet where sending the message is definitely different from adding a line break, which I do with Enter/Return. The same is also true for various web fora.

I have never used IRC, and maybe sending a message on Enter was appropriate for that. But with modern chats that use Markdown, where you have to insert newlines because the format requires it, I don't think that sending on Enter is appropriate.

On at least one of the chats I use, I can switch to Enter->insert newline, Shift-Enter->send message, but the problem is that I use several chats, and several clients for these chats, and I have to perform the switch using some chat-specific way on every chat and maybe even on every client on every chat. It would be great if there was some general way to do that, like Unix's use of environment variables like $EDITOR.

Rocket chat

Posted Mar 4, 2026 10:16 UTC (Wed) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link]

I feel like shift-enter should always be the "softer" version, the one that e.g. starts a new line instead of a new paragraph, and especially never finishes and sends the message. I prefer using ctrl-enter for actually sending the message, leaving both enter and shift-enter for formatting the message (even when both enter and shift-enter act identically). It's what I'm used to in Thunderbird, but I think I've seen it in other mail clients and in chat boxes as well.

Rocket chat

Posted Mar 4, 2026 10:54 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

To me it seems like any chat system I have ever used has used Enter for sending and if it supports multi-line at all Shift-Enter for soft newlines without sending, seems reasonably close to a universal standard that we probably shouldn't screw with it because we can hopefully all agree that having different behavior in different chat applications would be the worst of all worlds.

Rocket chat

Posted Mar 6, 2026 15:02 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> because we can hopefully all agree that having different behavior in different chat applications would be the worst of all worlds.

because we can hopefully all agree that having different behavior in different ---- applications would be the worst of all worlds.

There. Fixed it.

Cheers,
Wol