Submitting a form by pressing enter without a submit button

Question

Notice
Please do not use this in the year 2021+. Look down below and pick a better - more modern - answer.

Try:

<input type="submit" style="position: absolute; left: -9999px"/>

That will push the button waaay to the left, out of the screen. The nice thing with this is, you'd get graceful degradation when CSS is disabled.

Update - Workaround for IE7

As suggested by Bryan Downing + with tabindex to prevent tab reach this button (by Ates Goral):

<input type="submit" 
       style="position: absolute; left: -9999px; width: 1px; height: 1px;"
       tabindex="-1" />

I think you should go the Javascript route, or at least I would:

<script type="text/javascript">
// Using jQuery.

$(function() {
    $('form').each(function() {
        $(this).find('input').keypress(function(e) {
            // Enter pressed?
            if(e.which == 10 || e.which == 13) {
                this.form.submit();
            }
        });

        $(this).find('input[type=submit]').hide();
    });
});
</script>


<form name="loginBox" target="#here" method="post">
    <input name="username" type="text" /><br />
    <input name="password" type="password" />
    <input type="submit" />
</form>

Have you tried this ?

<input type="submit" style="visibility: hidden;" />

Since most browsers understand visibility:hidden and it doesn't really work like display:none, I'm guessing that it should be fine, though. Haven't really tested it myself, so CMIIW.

Another solution without the submit button:

HTML

<form>
  <input class="submit_on_enter" type="text" name="q" placeholder="Search...">
</form>

jQuery

$(document).ready(function() {

  $('.submit_on_enter').keydown(function(event) {
    // enter has keyCode = 13, change it if you want to use another button
    if (event.keyCode == 13) {
      this.form.submit();
      return false;
    }
  });

});

For anyone looking at this answer in future, HTML5 implements a new attribute for form elements, hidden, which will automatically apply display:none to your element.

e.g.

<input type="submit" hidden />

Use following code, this fixed my problem in all 3 browsers (FF, IE and Chrome):

<input  type="submit" name="update" value=" Apply " 
    style="position: absolute; height: 0px; width: 0px; border: none; padding: 0px;"
    hidefocus="true" tabindex="-1"/>

Add above line as a first line in your code with appropriate value of name and value.

Just set the hidden attribute to true:

<form name="loginBox" target="#here" method="post">
    <input name="username" type="text" /><br />
    <input name="password" type="password" />
    <input type="submit" hidden="true" />
</form>