Suggest a topic for next Monday down below!

Speaking of the `enter` key, you may be interested in the difference and history of Enter vs Return

My keyboard from AliExpress doesn’t have a Tab button, it says *’Mr. Pibb’*

i have a Underwood typewriter from 1920 that actually says "Tabular Key" instead of Tab, very interesting!

This is the second time you turn my video topic suggestion into an actual video, thanks a lot for that! 😘

I learned to type in 1966 back in highschool, and definitely remember setting and using tab-stops. Still have a typewriter, though can't remember when I last used it LOL. It was bought for my 18th birthday when we were still living in the US and after returning to the UK in 1973 I actually had a [£] added to it.

Its clearly for TABS: Totally Accurate Battle Simulator

Sometimes the "enter" key is marked just an arrow pointing down and then to the left, so it rally IS a go down (and then left) key.

Interesting. I always thought it was because manual typewriters set a tab stop by raising a tab of metal on the carriage mechanism that stopped its movement when the TAB key released the carriage to move.

My mom got a typewriter in the 90’s. By the 00’s it wasn’t needed, but still in working order. So little me turned it into a toy.

1:40 In a previous video I warned I was old (but 70 is the new 30). We had a typewriter at home like that. (A friend's mother was a highly successful romantic novel author, and she had what she called her tripewriter). Our typewriter had a bar along which one could slide the tabulation stops, which were mechanical devices that impeded, or stopped, travel of the carriage - hence tab stop. On some typewriters there was a lever to return the carriage to the left ("Carriage return"), and a separate means (occasionally just a knob on the platten) to shift the paper to the next line ("Line feed"). On more expensive typewriters the carriage return lever was coupled to a line feed mechanism so the typist simply pressed the lever to the left and produced a carriage-return/line-feed. Often the line spacing could be varied as part of that mechanism.

To extend this further, on Unix-derived operating systems like OS X and Linux a common daemon (service) is cron, which will run scheduled commands. The configuration file for this has regular fields like the minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week to run the command, which user to run the command as, and finally the command. This regular format helps explain why the traditional name for this configuration file is `crontab`.

As kids, we still used the out-sourced typewriter my mother got from her work as a secretary. Every typo was the largest nightmare...

This is just fine for a topic. It is a name. A name of a keyboard key.

I VAGUELY recall my mum telling me snippets of the information you've presented here. She took keyboarding and secretary classes in her high school, so she knew a bunch of neat shorthand (I still use w/ and w/o [with / without] to this day), but for some reason I also recall most clearly he explaining to me the different uses of the pound/number sign. I think because I thought it was a tic-tac-toe board, and was curious why it was so tiny, and how you could possibly play tic-tac-toe with such a tiny symbol on a computer. This was early 90s. EDIT: Weird, but someone just posted a reply for this comment asking for clarification if by pound/number sign I mean hashtag, and I just want to confirm that yes, that's what I mean. I just didn't include the term "hashtag" as my mum didn't teach me about it since we weren't using it in that way in the early 90s. If you who posted this inquiry are reading this, and you deleted your comment because you were afraid of being called stupid or otherwise attacked, please don't be afraid of asking for clarification. I saw your comment and there was nothing wrong with it; just a plea for clarification, which is absolutely valid and reasonable to ask for. I hope you see this, and I hope that your query has been adequately answered.

"The personal computer will never replace the electric typewriter." -Benjamin Franklin

It's not just that you make well researched, engaging, entertaining videos about interesting things, you're just such a cool dude. Been a subscriber for many years and I'm still always happy when you upload. ✌️

I remember using manual typewriters and they had other keys on them for TAB STOP and TAB CLEAR. If you wanted to make nice tables with columns of words, numbers, etc. then you had to figure out where the typewriter carriage should stop for each column. Press the TAB STOP button there. In the carriage this would lower a tiny metal slab (tab?) that was enough to physically stop the carriage there but let it continue when you typed at least one character. Remove these with TAB CLEAR and the carriage goes back to stopping only at the margins you set.

love this, these obscure topics are fun to learn about

I'm an older guy who grew up using a typewriter, well at least from age 14 or so (late 1960s). So I found this topic very interesting, even though I knew most the information you presented. I caught one minor mistake. On a typewriter you can reliably use the space bar to line things up. They all used fixed width fonts. They were either Elite (12 characters per inch) or or Pica (10 characters per inch), but not both (at least not until the IBM Selectric came out with its replaceable type head). That meant all spaces were the same width as all visible characters, and it was straightforward to line things up with the space bar. For columnar data or paragraph indents, yeah, you'd probably want to use the Tab functionality, but it was by no means necessary.

Now days when typing on a computer, the software suggests the next word or so and hitting the tabilation button enters it on your page. so you do not have to type it...... how great is that!

Its been a while since I've heard the word faff and it made me smile. Faff needs to be used more often.

As info: I checked 8 physical keyboards from a variety of manufacturers that I happen to have in this room and the next. Every one of them labels the key "TAB", and 5 of them also have the right-pointing-arrow-and-bar symbol. It might possibly be less pervasive outside America though.

This is SO name explain!! I loved this video, I thought it was interesting and I loved the funny graphics, like the plank of wood for tabular

I haven't thought about this in ages, but I remember setting my tab presets on my old typewriter!

I have long thought, throughout my later adult life, of the 'Tab' key as an abbreviation of 'Tabulation'. By a remarkable coincidence, casting my mind back to a 1920s-vintage Imperial typewriter we had in my childhood and then later life, the tab stops were set using removable tabs in slots on a bar on the back of the carriage, so my initial thoughts were that the 'Tab' key simply meant 'tab' and wasn't an abbreviation for anything.

Good explanation. You could add how you can still use tab to go between the fields of a web form, and also the rise of shift-tab

I think it goes deeper than just being a "table organizer". Sheet music has been in use long before the type writer was even an idea, and the lines used to write the musical notes are usually divided into smaller equal-sized sections per page-width. These smaller sections are called music tabs, and they dictate the flow of the rythm of that section. The 3/4 or 4/4 at the start of the sheet music stipulate that the music has 3 or 4 beats per tab. Similarly to how the tab-key works today, a music tab can arrange the sheet music in a neat table-form.

I enjoyed this video!❤❤

US Keyboards usually say Tab and Enter, and sometimes also have the glyphs. It seems like UK keyboards tend to only have the glyphs and assume you know what it means. Enter keys are also a weird shape on UK keyboards for some reason

Correction: the Latin word for "plank" is "tabula", not "tabulaR", which is instead the English adjective derivation. But I understand that a non-rhotic dialect makes it difficult to distinguish between the two: NewScientist has an article titled "The lunar armarda", rather than "The lunar armada".

Each character in text typed on a computer is represented by a number from 0 to 255. Control characters are also represented by a number. A space is 32. New Line is 10. New Line is. The typed text contains characters that have an effect rather than being displayed. Tab is such a character. It's code is nine.

For various reasons Tab always makes me think of Elle MacPherson walking out of the sea. I miss that bitter saccharine aftertaste.

Could have been named after the metal tabs that would stop the carriage at locations that had the metal tab set. While you had to set the tabs individualy you could clear them by holding down the tab clear key and moving the carriage back an forth. (At least on my Royal.)

I wonder if there was a transition from physical table to data table at some point. Like, a shopkeeper organizing products on a display table, then diagraming that layout on paper. That layout could simplify over time from pictures to icons to words/numbers.

I actually knew it. Hooray.

I see "Tab" on more keyboards than not. But I'm not a keyboard head.

I remember trying to erase things on a "self erasing" typewriter....what a pain..I would never go back to pre word processor times.

The keyboard I write this comment on has a tab key with the word "tab" on it so it's definitely not you misremembering stuff. Also, this video is actually quite on-brand for your channel IMO, since you explained the name of the tab key.

It is the "any" key that I can't find. Ha Ha

I wonder therefore whether typewriters in accountants’ practices would have extra tabs so as to align the type with the table. Whether the lines of the table were inscribed on the paper prior to or after the application of data is another question.

Unfortunately, I remember struggling with the early word processing programs (like Word Perfect) because I could not figure out how to set the tabs! The typewriter was still better partly because the finished paper didn't look as good once printed in dot matrix.

Oh man, I'm so old what's basic info to me has become arcane knowledge to the newest generation.

I like the idea of explaining a normal word like Table into it's modern uses. But you could have went a bit further backwards as to why a place for family and food became known as a table.

Not seeing it yet, but tabs vs spaces. I think there is a lot to consider. Accessibility or clean formatting. Ensuring the consistency of spacing across systems or configs, etc.

Well, that explains the 'tab' key, but it doesn't explain how we're "keeping tabs" on all this information! ;-) I used a typewriter, an old Undewood from the 1920s or 30s, when I was in high school, although the typing class I took had IBM Selectrics. Computers and word processors made typing letters and forms and essays so much easier, it's no wonder typewriters became obsolete so quickly.

tabs always makes me think of bar tabs

Without watching: isn't it tabulator? Probably meaning tabula like in "tabula rasa" meaning blank page? So tabulator probably means blank space?

"Enter" used to be "Return" because it would go to the beginning of the next line. "Enter" is derived from the added uses of the button due to computers.

Most keyboards still say Tab. Some tablet keyboards have a tiny reduced Tab key and don't have the space for the full word. I guess they think they can get by with a related name for the whole device instead. Some Mac style keyboards also do this, they have no excuse.

2:17 Describing issues with MS Word. Other professional word processors have solutions for those issues. And yes, there other actually other professional word processors (and no, those do not include Google Docs, which are even more questionable than MS Word).

I worked with an old manual typewriter, and it had moveable stops one had to remove and place along the line to set a tab stop.

1:23…You're breaking my little typewriter collector's heart 😿

You forgot the more important fact, typewriters used to have physically metal "tabs" that stopped the carriage. Some models allowed you to move the tab stops.

Song name? the chiptschune one?

Now if you could please explain why the Coca Cola company's original diet soda was called "Tab".

Please do “Enter/Return” (and why there are two competing names for this key).

German: Ich verwende die TAB Taste um durch Tabellen zu springen. I use the TAB key to jump through tables.

It’s called a tab key because typewriters had metal tabs you pulled or pushed to set where the carriage would stop each time you pushed it.

My new keyboard say "TAB" and doesn't have an arrow.

Origins of board game names like Ludo, chess, Catan, draughts, hnefatafl, etc.

I feel like custom mechanical keyboards have taken on the vibe of typewriters in terms of analog typing machine

Could the term "forward slash" be considered pseudo-redundant since the forward slash *is* the slash character?

You know how Tab cycles through buttons or other input objects? Well I always thought it was called Tab because it could cycle through tabs, as in the things at the top of your web browser or things of a similar function.

Huh. I just looked on my laptop. The tab key has the word "tab" on it, then under that an arrow to the left and under that an arrow to the right. I never noticed 🤣

It's labelled "⇥ TAB" on my keyboard, but that's with custom keycaps. The included keycaps used "tab ↹".

Me, an intellectual: Its a sodey pop

I have several keyboards they all spell out Tab

Scroll Lock That's the true mystery

'Tabulate'..... Comes from typewriter days

How about the other uses of "tab" ? Like picking up the tab or there's a tab at the bar.

My brand new laptop has a 'tab' key, labelled as such.

Wasn’t the Tab key named after the drink? 😜

Never knew what it did

My HP laptop circa 2023 has "Tab" on the key.

I hope you all will be civil and polite when I say that I've set my tabs in VSCode to take up 2 spaces. TWO!

Wow, It's really early in the comments!

👍

I think you made a mistake at 4:33 - the Latin word is 'tabula', not 'tabular'. 'Tabular' is, as you say, an English word for something 'table-like'. Also, 'tabula' in Latin also means a board for writing stuff - or like a clay tablet.

The tabular key

So the original purpose for the Tab key was something i didnt even know it could do 😅

3:44 see ya later tabulator

you can also table this discussion, and talk about it later

I wonder how Microsoft came up with the name of "Excel" for their tabulator program.

My guess before watching the video: Tabulate

It is used to take the cursor to the next tab stop

My Logitech G-915 has "TAB", but my Asus laptop has the symbol instead.

I thought tab being short for tabulation was common knowledge ngl I was taught to use it to go from one data entry to an other without using the mouse (like writing your username, pressing tab to go to the password box and writing there) and also to use it for essays and school work to start new paragraphs after a full stop. Pretty useless imo

There's at least 6 videos on the tab kay

It's obviously to make indents in coding.

Plank!

😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢

😢😢😢😢😢😢

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I haven’t seen the video yet but I predict it will have Homer Simpson requesting the drink Tab from his computer Edit: I am very disappointed in you.

Tab you later!

The tab key doesn't indent on any of the keyboards that I use anymore T_T Now it moves to the next element of a page.. like in this comment, if I do it tab highlights the 'cancel' link for this comment :(

Tabulator?

Tabarnak XD

In Dutch, "table" can be translated into "tafel" (the thing you sit around) and "tabel" (with the ephases on the e, very strange I know). The Dutch equivalent of "to tabulate" is "tabelleren" I think. But there's a catch: there are the feared "maaltafels" (if you translate it via a translate engine, you get "grinding table", which is a hilariously litteral translation), which are those things you learn by heart in primary school, like 4 times 5 is 20, 5 times 5 is 25, 7 times 9 is 63 and so on. I have no idea why they are called "tafels", it probably has something to do with the shared ethymology of "tafel" and "tabel".