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I use command-enter key sequences in applications like slack and gmail often and find them very helpful.

I'd like a user to be able to submit a form in a web application I'm building with command-enter on a mac. I'm not sure what the appropriate equivalent is on windows.

I've noticed slack maps command-enter to ctrl-shift-enter on windows, while gmail maps it to ctrl-enter. Any thoughts on which of these is more idiomatic / appropriate for windows?

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  • Don't know the answer, but you should really word your question as "What's the Windows equivalent for [Functionality X]" rather than the keyboard shortcut.
    – William Anderson
    May 4, 2017 at 18:20
  • Not sure I understand. Are you suggesting I change the question to something like "What's the appropriate windows equivalent for submitting a web form via a key command"?
    – Peter Berg
    May 4, 2017 at 19:39
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    There is no standard that is used, although ctrl+enter is the most common combination I've seen to perform this functionality. No matter what you do, you're going to be implementing a feature that's not a standard in web forms, so should combine it with help text and proper accessibility.
    – Liam Hammett
    May 4, 2017 at 21:06
  • In my experience, Mac relies on [command] + (key) while Windows relies on [control] + (key). I'm a Windows user, but my wife has a Mac. I find that I can pretty reliably still use keyboard shortcuts on her computer by applying this rule.
    – maxathousand
    May 4, 2017 at 21:50

2 Answers 2

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Ctrl+Enter is the most common keyboard shortcut for submitting a message, but as you noticed, Ctrl+Shift+Enter is also used in some applications.

Shift+Enter is the de facto standard shortcut for creating a new line in a field that submits on Enter

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Does it matter? Had it been a standard keyboard shortcut (like Copy or Paste), you'd know the windows equivalent. Seeing it is not, how many people work on both Windows and Mac and expect an heuristic for keyboard shortcut mapping?

Having said that, and from my experience only, the command key on a mac is mapped to control on windows. It is somewhat uncommon to have on a mac a keyboard shortcut with control as the only modifier.

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    I think that's a good point though I'm not particularly concerned about people who use both OSX and windows but rather just windows users and what they might expect to see.
    – Peter Berg
    May 4, 2017 at 21:16
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    That is most likely to be Ctrl-Enter. That is the case with Visual Studio Code and Pro Tools. I believe that if you check other software manuals, you'll see the same.
    – Izhaki
    May 4, 2017 at 21:31
  • Great, that's good to know :)
    – Peter Berg
    May 4, 2017 at 23:06

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