Forum Discussion
Allow new line on Enter / CTRL-Enter to submit instead of Enter submits
Feature request / quality of life issue
Thoughtful prompts are typically more than one sentence and often more than one paragraph. The Microsoft Copilot 365 app and Copilot in the various Office applications is determined to ensure that by pressing Enter, you submit your prompt. This is not only occasionally infuriating when you're writing a complex prompt, but it wastes time, money, processing, and destroys the environment even more than it is already doing. It also is a poor experience to get back to editing your unintentionally submitted prompt. To get a new line, we must press SHIFT-ENTER. Slack lets me enable ENTER for a new line, as does WhatsApp, Teams in rich text mode, Signal in "big text box" mode, and probably most things.
Tip: I use the ChatGPT Ctrl+Enter Sender browser extension to let me press ENTER in all my browser-based AI chat interfaces, which prevents this utterly foreseeable problem. It is excellent and highly recommended.
Constant context switching makes the action of writing vs. submitting the prompt easily confusable:
Is it ENTER? Most IM apps let you choose this option. All text editors use ENTER for a new paragraph, not a newline. Thoughtful prompts require writing like a text editor, so your brain is already in text editor mode. Writing your prompt in a text editor and pasting into the Copilot app is a very bad UX, doesn't capture the use cases where you do stuff like paste screen captures, and let's face it, requires an unrealistic level of planning.
Is it SHIFT-ENTER? Web forms often require SHIFT-ENTER for a new paragraph, which is confusing for non-technical users, because it really should be the shortcut for a newline. Contrast that with most instant messaging applications that, out of the box, use ENTER for message submission and SHIFT-ENTER for a newline, as does the Copilot 365 app. (Terminal users from 40+ years ago will disagree with me. Come at me from retirement, bro.) If you use Copilot 365 in a browser, your thinking is shaped by the fact you're in a browser. My focus is the app. You have an app because it can do more, and that includes customization of the user interface and user experience. We don't expect the app UI/UX to be the browser UI/UX. That's why we have the app.
Is it CTRL-ENTER? Shouldn't be. That's typically a "submit" action. Regardless whether ENTER is a new line, CTRL-ENTER is submit. Outlook desktop does that, Gmail does that, Slack does that, etc.
Is it ALT-ENTER? O hai, Excel in-cell text editing!
Most instant messaging applications allow you to toggle between pressing ENTER or CTRL-ENTER to send, which means with a simple setting, you can arrange all the applications in your life to behave the same. That's a very good thing.