Keyboard shortcut for "Submit form"

Question

I use a form maybe 100 times a day. I can tab between the fields with no problem but most of the time I don't have to fill out the entire form and would like to submit it without having to touch the mouse and press the bottom button. The other alternative is to whack Tab ten or twelve times through all the fields. Is there a keyboard convention for submitting a form? How could I design this to submit a form from the keyboard?

Some of the form fields are <textarea> so it probably would be good to keep the <Enter> key as a newline character.

Answer 1

Enter is almost always the "submit form now" button whenever you're in a field, if anything the textarea fields are horning in on this functionality and not vice versa; I would nix them and anything that accepts newlines unless it's actually necessary or used by your users. Just look at facebook; almost all the time enter posts immediately, and I like this, facebook is mostly small single paragraphs of text. But in the status post box this doesn't work...the inconsistency is annoying, and rarely if ever is a new line needed.

Answer 2

I vote for enter key but always let the users know that this is an available option, ie:

Answer 3

I believe that the [Enter]-key is the convention for submitting the form.

Answer 4

I say keep the enter key, even though it works as a newline in the text areas

Depending on what the form does, ctrl+s or alt+s might be appropriate shortcuts

Answer 5

I suggest to use Ctrl+Enter (or Cmd+Enter for macOS) to submit forms. As time goes by, more and more web apps and software are using this standard that, I guess, came from the shortcut to send emails (you can test it on Gmail).

List of software that uses it:

• Gmail
• Outlook
• Jetbrains IntelliJ (For submitting a commit, a push or a comment on Upsource)
• Jira (to submit edits on task description)
• ClickUp (to create a new task)

and many others.