Rocket chat [LWN.net]

Rocket chat

Posted Mar 4, 2026 8:13 UTC (Wed) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to: Rocket chat by jzb
Parent article: Open-source Discord alternatives

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.

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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