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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

monospace source text: two spaces.

WYSIWYG or compiled final output: the layout engine knows how to adjust keming better than i do, and will strip out or adjust space distances to look “right” no matter how many spaces I type. So i might as well type two and maintain hand memory consistency.

So as far as i’m concerned, it’s a no-op in practice. For myself i learned two-space long ago, my hands are unlikely to retrain themselves to type otherwise, and it’s probably a slight legibility help in docstrings and latex source.

edit: as i edit this on my phone i realize that one place this doesn’t work is on an on-screen keyboard. There, typing the second space too quickly usually inserts another period!

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Somewhat amused by the "keming" you refer to. I assume it's tongue-in-cheek. :-)

Double-space into period is a customizable feature of on-screen keyboards (at least Gboard).

yea that was an intentional typo :)

There is a decent-sized subreddit called Keming[0], if anyone's interested.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/keming/

Several years ago I started putting every sentence on a new line when I write LaTeX, as it makes diffs cleaner if I want to go back and compare versions of a document.

I do the same but I noticed it feels very weird to write like that, it feels much more staccato, as if there's a bigger pause between each sentence. Nowadays I write paragraphs normally and then split the lines afterwards.

we’re all conditioned by twitter now, it should be fine! /s

Now that you mention it though i bet there’s an easy macro to do this in emacs ...

For the most part I do the same when writing emails.

Appears to be a higher chance of people reading them that way.

I don't write a lot of fluff though, and usually have two or three trimming passes before sending.

I do the same in source documentation, to limit the portion that has to be reformatted when changing something in the middle.

i’d have trouble keeping line length limits in docstrings.

It doesn't mean that a sentence can't contain line breaks. It means that there's a line break after each sentence. This causes paragraph reformatting (for maintaining line length) to be restricted to the current sentence, instead of also affecting the following sentences.

For me two spaces in fixed-width fonts is too jarring, as the spaces themselves are significantly wider than in proportional fonts (relative to average letter width), and also the period glyph already adds horizontal space.

For proportional fonts, on the other hand, two spaces would help the layout engine to distinguish between the end of a sentence and other uses of period-followed-by-space (abbreviations, mostly).

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