Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad – British English
I have been watching your videos related to the Mac Keyboard such as ‘Getting to Know the Mac Keyboard’ and ‘The Secret History of Mac Keyboard Keys’, both of which are very helpful and informative.
On my keyboard at the bottom right there is the large return key for the calculator keypad.
There is a symbol on that key which looks a little bit, but not much, like Pi. Does this mean this key will do other tricks? I have tried it with all the modifier keys and nothing special appears to happen.
Many thanks.
I am exploring the possibilities of using keyboard commands more frequently in future. For example, I have just set Stage Manager to be turned on and off by the keyboard command ^ M.
I just wondered what this symbol is there for and what it does, if anything. I didn’t see anything about it in the videos.
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Phil Hopkins
That's the Enter key. I don't know why the British keyboard only has a symbol and not a word as well.
In many cases you can use it in the same way you use the Return key, which also only has a symbol for you. I guess the idea is that if you are adding numbers together you can type the numbers, operators, and Enter all without leaving the numeric keypad portion of the keyboard.
But the Return and Enter keys are two separate things, so they can be used for different things by some apps. For instance in the Script Editor app, Return will go to the next line and Enter will act like the "Compile the Script" button. But if you are typing in Pages both keys do the same thing. If you are using an app like Keyboard Maestro, you can assign something to the Enter key that would only happen with the Enter key, not the Return key.
Thanks very much for clearing that up for me Gary. I've been fiddling around with that for ages to see if it would do anything else. I've not seen that symbol before.