Hacker News Reader

Comment by tuhin | Hacker News Reader

I was having the exact discussion with a friend yesterday of what the default behaviour in real time should be.

My friend was of the opinion that it should be Enter to post and "Shift+Enter" to add a new line. What facebook did today basically.

My stand was the oppposite. Shift+Enter for a new comment and enter for new line.

The reason being that even if I press enter thinking it would post my comment, the error handling (forgiveness to the user) is minimal and I can either click the button or be informed that to post I need shift + Enter.

However if I do it the way facebook does and press enter thinking it would take me to a new line without me realising that I posted a comment that is half of what I wanted to say.

Lesson: Let you interface be forgiving and give it priority over simplicity.

View on HN

I've got this same issue with the StackOverflow comments system. Usually, I type something, and type enter to go to the next line. Oops, you posted the comment (luckily they have an edit function, but still...)

Usability wise, it makes a lot more sense to have "enter" be a new line. That's how it works in any textarea and document. We're trained to naturally expect that. Enter to submit only makes sense on one line inputs. Anything that resembles a text area should have shift + enter to submit(or control + enter). This is most intuitive.

>Usability wise, it makes a lot more sense to have "enter" be a new line.

I disagree. The paradigm they're using here isn't that of word processing a document, but rather quick text conversations. In pretty much every chat/IM program I've ever used, "enter" == "send", and shift+enter == newline.

Exactly! Dow you want the conversations to be one liners (witty or shallow) OR do you want people to have meaningful conversations?

Assumption: You cannot always have meaningful conversation with one liners.

I'm going to suggest that you're probably an outlier. I would think that a large majority of Facebook comments are one-liners. The typical Facebook commenter is writing multi-paragraph in-depth comments every day. So I think this change does a good job of optimizing for the general case.

There's no way 14 year old girls using Facebook are gonna figure out that shift+enter submits, all you'd see in that scenario is a bunch of people complaining about how they couldn't submit any commits... or not, as they wouldn't be able to submit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com