Should the Enter key always trigger the default button, no matter which child control has the focus

Question

I have a form with a default OK button, and a Cancel button. I have a treeview with nodes that can be edited, i.e. you can double-click them or press F2 to open another form.

Now, I've never liked that F2 shortcut, and now that I'm enabling treeview label edition, it's even worse. My first reaction when testing the form was to press "Enter" to edit the selected node, but doing this would go against the normal default button behavior.

Your opinion: Should an application always enforce the default button being triggered with the Enter key? If so what kind of shortcut should an application use to "edit the selected item"?

Answer 1

Definitely not... Confuses our users no end that enter doesn't select what they have highlighted.

Answer 2

Absolutely no. The Enter key is often used to fire the default button but equally often not. For example, Enter generally means new line in a multiline textbox.

Enter sounds like a good bet in this scenario. F2 tends to mean "Edit" in Windows.

However, if this is a long-standing application you may just irritate users who are used to F2.