The <CR> button?

**Tinker Tantrum** · October 31st, 2011

Sorry for my noobness in advance: I was wondering what <CR> stands for in various Vim manuals, etc. I keep seeing <CR>, but have no idea if that is a key sequence or abbreviation or what!

**Devi1903** · October 31st, 2011

Carriage Return if i am not mistaken

**Telengard C64** · October 31st, 2011

Possibly refers to carriage return, aka enter. Just guessing though.

edit

I think maybe it refers strictly to the ASCII character for carriage return. Depending on your operating system, this may or may not be the same as the code(s) generated by pressing the Enter key.

Originally Posted by VIM USER MANUAL v7.3

*23.1* DOS, Mac and Unix files
Back in the early days, the old Teletype machines used two characters to
start a new line. One to move the carriage back to the first position
(carriage return, <CR>), another to move the paper up (line feed, <LF>).
When computers came out, storage was expensive. Some people decided that
they did not need two characters for end−of−line. The UNIX people decided
they could use <Line Feed> only for end−of−line. The Apple people
standardized on <CR>. The MS−DOS (and Microsoft Windows) folks decided to
keep the old <CR><LF>.

http://www.eandem.co.uk/mrw/vim/usr_doc/index.html

**dave0109** · October 31st, 2011

Yes, CR = Carraige Return. It basically means press the <enter> or <return> key.

UNIX distinguishes because lines are ended with just a CR on UNIX, but Windows uses CR followed by LF (Line Feed).

**sisco311** · October 31st, 2011

Yep, it's Carriage Return (ASCII 13). Often written as ^M or \r. CRs are found just before newlines in text files generated by DOS/Windows apps.

In vim, type :help keycodes.

**sisco311** · October 31st, 2011

Originally Posted by dave0109

Yes, CR = Carraige Return. It basically means press the <enter> or <return> key.

UNIX distinguishes because lines are ended with just a CR on UNIX, but Windows uses CR followed by LF (Line Feed).

Hmmm, there are three different kinds of line endings in common use:

Unix systems use Line Feeds (LFs) only.
MS-DOS and Windows systems use CR-LF pairs.
Old Macintosh systems use CRs only.

**Tinker Tantrum** · October 31st, 2011

Ah ha. Yes. You are right. You are "all" right. Thank you!!

**anewguy** · November 1st, 2011

And where does it come from? A typewriter. In the manual days you actually had to return the carriage back manually in order to start typing at the beginning. A line feed was accomplished in conjunction with this depending on how you did the return. When typewriters went electric, eventually the carriage no longer moved, just the print head. They needed something for everyone to understand who was used to the old way. CR was introduced as the abbreviation for a carriage return. When this is stored in a file at that time CR also represents an actual character. LF was introduced as the abbreviation for a line feed. Some OS's, when dealing with text files, take a CR as a CR/LF combination, others as just a CR. CR or a null was sometimes used to indicate the end of a "line" record in a text file as well.

Just part of what it's all about - all of that for a simple pair of characters, eh?

Dave