When commit means cancel

A strange thing happens when you press Enter on an empty item in a list in most text editors – the entire list item disappears: This feels counterintuitive. Isn’t Enter for committing and adding more things? Wouldn’t Backspace be the right key to press to break a list? Yes, and no. I am not sure who invented this pattern (I spotted it first in Word 95), but that someone understood a strange interaction contract existing in text editing – Enter is actually an escape hatch. In text editing, no matter where you are, you can always press Enter multiple times to just create more room for writing. In an app that doesn’t cancel a list on Enter, you can face a terrifying moment where you get stuck in a list, and getting stuck is never fun. This principle feels so useful that I see more and more apps apply a version of it for other things. For example, in many modern text editors pressing Enter after a headline returns you to regular text, just so it’s not as easy to get stuck in a headline…