Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
@AnotherCat: Why on earth would you wake up your computer by pressing enter? If you do that pretty much anything could happen, up to and including your entire hard disk being deleted depending on just what was selected before the monitor slept. Compared to that having a book opened for viewing is entirely harmless.
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OS is Windows 10 on all PCs - For myself, I don't wake the computer from sleep by just pressing ENTER (or any other key), I have waking from sleep as PIN protected (for security, if nothing else); ENTER then produces an Incorrect PIN so I don't need to worry.
However, I do turn on the display if it times out (which it does after a shorter delay than PC sleep) by pressing any standard key, often that turns out to be ENTER. {In critical applications I would expect one would not have displays turning off (unless hardware switched) nor computer sleeping}.
That said, as far as I am aware for Windows (since at least XP perhaps??? I cannot comment on Linux and its derivatives), any standard key is stated as valid and regarded as "safe" for re-turning on the display or for waking the PC from sleep. But I agree that using ENTER can lead to difficulties, even if just of the likes of the non catastrophic example I gave in my previous post (which types have to be handled at the application design level).
I would suggest that a very, very high percentage of users (almost all???)are unaware that issues could arise, however remote, through the use of ENTER and they accept at face value the Microsoft advice of use "any standard key" and hit whatever key takes their fancy and works. Apart from ending up somewhere unexpected I am not personally familiar with any calamitous outcomes occurring.
But that said I can imagine calamitous cases such as one having, by way of example, reached the last click to accept a hard drive format before the display turns off and on re-turning on the display incorrectly with one or more keystrokes, one of which is an ENTER, setting off an unintended format (I don't think an "O" for the required "OK" will do it but I am not inclined to test
). But to have got that far in Windows and be unaware of it is unlikely in my opinion (and in my personal case I would never have
).
But the risks are not limited to use of ENTER as, for example, the display could close when one has a bunch of files selected in File Explorer and at the last click before deleting them - if one restarts the display with the "Y" key they will all be deleted, perhaps unintentionally.
You were right, in my opinion, to have raised the use of ENTER as a general alert to the possibility of unintended consequences. Although a risk can also exist with some other keys, the risk is less.
John