Tab key
| Symbol |
⇥ |
|---|---|
| ASCII | 0x09 <HT> Horizontal Tab |
| X11 | 0xff09 Tab |
| USB | 0x2B Keyboard Tab |
| Symbol |
⇤ |
|---|---|
| X11 | 0xfe20 ISO_Left_Tab |
A Tab key (short for tabulator key or tabular key) moves the cursor to the next tabulator stop (sometimes inserting characters) or to the next element in a dialogue box.
A Back-tab key moves the cursor back to the previous tab stop or to the previous element in a dialogue box.
Separate Tab and Back-Tab keys are mostly found on vintage computer keyboards and on typewriters, often on opposite sides of the keyboard. On most modern systems Back-tab is instead available on the key combination Shift+Tab. On PC keyboards the convention is to have the Tab symbol ⇥ in the bottom/left corner and the Back-tab symbol ⇤ in the top/left corner of the key to indicate that the latter is available with Shift. The text "Tab" is sometimes to the left of the symbols displacing the symbols somewhat to the right. On some PC keyboards the Tab key is incorrectly labelled with both symbols together as ↹ when other shifted legends are not, or even with both symbols on the same line.
On Macintosh the Tab key has only the text "tab" (US-ANSI) or the ⇥ symbol (German, Swedish, etc.).
Gallery
IBM 3101 Display Station keyboard with separate Tab and Back-Tab keys.
See also
- Tab key on Wikipedia.
