In the comment box, you can type new lines, but they are never rendered. This can trick people into thinking that they can separate text into paragraphs, when this is not possible.
I think that when the enter key is pressed, the comment should be submitted.
This would then be consistent with chat and asking a question.
Comments can now be submitted by hitting enter while in the comment textarea.
Although newlines are not rendered, you can still insert one into the textarea by hitting shift + enter.
Let us know if you find any issues with this new functionality.
shift+enter should be accounted for...a multi-line text box says "hey press enter, you're gonna love it"...if it matched other programs (even SO chat) in the shift+enter respect it'd be ok, but now it seems very broken, definitely thrown me off several times today.
Commented
Sep 6, 2010 at 23:03
Shift+enter has no effect after submitting the comment. How can you write readable code this way?
Commented
Apr 25, 2014 at 17:07
They might show in the data dump, right? That might be used for different formatting.
And even when they are never rendered, I still find them useful every now and then, especially when including inline links to other questions that might have dots or question marks in their titles. Enlarging the edit box in my browser, and using new lines, makes things slightly easier to read. Like:
See [How does the comment system and comments work?](How do comments work?) Or [How to use formatting in comments?](How to use formatting in comments?) (But that's just my opinion.)
Versus:
See [How does the comment system and comments work?](How do comments work?)
Or [How to use formatting in comments?](How to use formatting in comments?)
(But that's just my opinion.)
You only want this because your own personal workflow style is to write short comments that need very little thought or editing.
Whereas the more contemplative of us want to write, think, rewrite a bit, check our work, add URLs etc. On some platforms, especially mobile, the backspace and enter key are so close you hit one or the other by mistake all the time.
This is a "fail-deadly" configuration. In exchange for a tiny bit of convenience for you, we are stuck with a great deal of "Aargh, damn it", thrown off our train of thought, and having to struggle back to "edit comment".
To add insult to injury, a 5-minute timer is now ticking. No big deal to a drive-by like yourself, but us contemplative folks often are not able to finish our comment properly in those 5 minutes. Now we must go through yet more rigmarole to copy our failed comment, paste it to a new comment, and delete the earlier comment shard.
Even worse, in those minutes, a person often comes along and replies to our comment shard - and lacking our full meaning, their comment is often redundant, unconstructive or rooted in a wrong inference - and now when we fix our comment, or delete the comment shard and place the fixed comment below, the comment thread makes no sense whatsoever.
So the detour you must make when "press enter to post" misfires is much, much worse than the detour you must make when you hit enter and it moves down a line or does nothing. Hence, "fail deadly".
It also rewards and encourages flash/emotion/snark comments, and discourages thoughtful ones. That alone makes it more suitable for places like Youtube comments, not here.
