Every once in awhile you'll come across a
keyboard where the
Enter key kind of arcs up to cover the place you usually find the key for
backslash and
pipe, forming a kind of
fat backward letter L. The displaced backslash/pipe key is usually relocated to take up half of what would normally be the
backspace key. Keyboards like this really, really,
suck. They're mostly found in
computer labs, mostly on
windows boxes.
I suppose the logic behind these keyboards are that because pipe and backslash are used rather more infrequently in current windows versions than they were in MS-DOS, it would make sense to donate the prime keyboard real estate occupied by the extra-large backslash/pipe key to the more commonly used enter. This logic rests wholly on four tragically flawed assumptions:
- That you're using windows or the mac os (although i've never in my life seen a mac keyboard with the funky-L enter);
- That you aren't doing any kind of programming in a language that uses backslash for escape sequences or the pipe as some kind of operator (for example, or);
- That you have no real interest in having some kind of neutral, non-dangerous key between enter and backspace;
- And that you don't really care too much about having a full-size backspace key.
The keyboards on the computers at my school all have the funky-L enters. Every time i
telnet from a school computer to one of my
*n?x shells, i go several times through the excruciatingly painful experience of trying to use
Bash's
pipeline command to perform some task-- usually just as simple as catching program
output within
less-- and having my fingers automatically hit the "enter" key thinking they were going for the pipeline. Keep in mind that the pipeline is always placed at the end of a valid
command, so Bash never catches my mistake, and so my
fingers just assume they slipped and hit enter by accident. So my fingers try the command several times over until either my
eyes notice the pipeline key is elsewhere or my confused
brain remembers the problem has happened before. This same experience is shared by pretty much all of the
*n?x-friendly people at the school on a constant basis.
I've never seen anyone purposefully hit the upward leg of an oversized Enter key in order to produce an Enter.