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I learned two spaces in typing class. I think having two spaces after the period looks better and makes more sense, both in fixed-width fonts and in variable-width fonts. I've never heard an argument against it that wasn't based on incorrect premises ("You don't need to do that anymore! It looks fine without it!" Well, no it doesn't look fine without it, so yes, I'm going to keep doing it.)

But yeah, it's weird the effects of backwards compatibility... so many things decided 40 years ago, which we can't change because it would break someone's configuration.

Do you think pretty much the entire web looks awful then? Because HTML rendering collapses whitespace by default. Your comment renders with only a single space after the period, despite the fact that you typed 2.

Speaking only for myself, but yes I do think all modern typography gets this wrong and looks terrible as a result.

Googling the question right now, there are two recent developments I was unaware of. There’s a 2018 paper [1] about it showing no perceptual benefit to either spacing, and also in 2020 MS Word changed their spelling checker to consider 2 spaces an error [2]. This second article tells the opposite story from what I thought I’d heard (but maybe this is what I was thinking of) - it says 2 spaces were developed for monospaced typewriters, and not for print.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1527-6

[2] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/spaces-after-period/

The way I see it, if some typesetting system thinks one space looks better than two and renders two as one anyway, or if the difference is otherwise imperceptible, then there's still no reason for me to stop using two. It's pure muscle memory and if people can't tell the difference then I'm not going to stop.

Sounds good to me. I wonder if your comment was intended to respond to the sibling comment to mine? Anyway, I’d agree there’s no reason to stop, and anyway 2 spaces has been the rule and still is for some people. Language and technology being fluid is why there’s debate and why the number of spaces has changed over time, and it’s also why it’s okay to do it the way you want to.

Your summary of the 2018 paper was incorrect. They found it made no difference to people who typed 1 space. People who typed 2 spaces read 2 spaced text 3% faster with equal comprehension. And the limitations were significant. The subjects were young and had normal or corrected to normal vision. The task was reading paragraphs in order. And I did not see periods inside sentences mentioned.

Thankfully, in most cases the correct single space is rendered, regardless of what you typed.

See, this is the attitude I don't understand. I'm not going around adding extra spaces after your periods; why are you so intent on removing mine? Who appointed you the textual aesthetics police? Let people add spaces according to what they think looks best, and the thing most people prefer will win out.

Feel free to add spaces, I’m just glad I don’t see them. I don’t even have to try to police anything to get the aesthetics I prefer, that was my point.

I recall the justification being the opposite. On the fixed-width of a typewriter, you need two spaces to add appropriate visual separation between sentences. With proportional fonts and proper software (or a typsetter using hot metal), they use fractionally wider spaces between sentences than between words: it's more of a 1.5 spaces than double-spaced.

It dates to the time when typewriters were new-fangled inventions in the latter end of the 19th century. In those days, it was still common practice for typesetters to use a larger space between sentences. Typewriter users mimicked that practice. Typesetting changed in the 20th century, now it is more usual to use a normal word space. Perception or ease of use has little to do with it.

I still use double-space after sentences because I like semantically distinguishing end-of-sentence from mid-sentence abbreviations.

i.e. if point is at the beginning of "This is Mr. Smith's hat. It is green." I want next-sentence to advance to "It", rather than "Smith".

Surely it would be better to use a purpose-built "long space" character, as would be done in typesetting. Em Space U+2003 might be a good candidate.

Would need to be easy to type (e.g by pressing space twice).

I was thinking could use abbrevs but it must expand word chars, not spaces.

You could bind it to a Compose key sequence, e.g. "Compose+Space Space". (Analogous to em-dash, which is "Compose-Hyphen Hyphen".)

But it's still an extra keystroke. And I worry that I'd cause problems editing non-UTF-8 documents if I retrained my fingers to use it at the end of every sentence and then didn't remember to switch back to the ASCII way of doing things.

Huh, didn't know abbrev had that limitation (wonder why?). Gave it a go in espanso (https://espanso.org/), and it does work there.

Edit: it would need context awareness too, which somewhat rules out espanso, otherwise space indentation will be difficult. abbrevs at least can be defined per mode, but ideally it would be based off the face (so it could work in comments or strings).

I put that sentence into a "scratch.txt" and a .org buffer in emacs, and when I hit M-e (forward-sentence) it just goes to the end of the line ...

Then I realized that the 1st sentence was missing the extra space after the 2nd period, and then M-e jumped to the end of the first sentence.

In vim, hitting ) in normal mode stopped after each period.

Then I realized that the 1st sentence was missing the extra space after the 2nd period, and then M-e jumped to the end of the first sentence.

Yeah, my comment rendered as HTML, which stripped the double-space from the original text I entered.

Using double-space means that the source document is unambiguous, thus you preserve options for whatever renders the text—keep the double-space, strip it, convert it to Unicode, etc.

I wonder can it do “   ” (3x &nbsp;)?

EDIT apparently not

Mate, if raw HTML worked, HN comments would be a terrible place.

I held out like you are doing for many years, but gave in about 7 years ago and to compensate, I omit the period when I write "Mr" and "Dr" (like the Brits do).

I also gave in and started top-posting in email messages.

Heh, I recently did a "clean sweep" of my .emacs files (inspired by the new support for `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/config/emacs/init.el` in 27.1) and something like 90% of it was workarounds (some dating back to the late 1990s, for example a "vertical-motion-fix" for something that was fixed in emacs 19.29)

I definitely recommend doing some form of "dotfile bankruptcy" every 20 years or so :-)

(I also ended up doing a crude "load-file-literate" so that now most of my elisp is actually markdown, inspired by https://github.com/skx/dotfiles )

Some languages use a wider type of whitespace than the regular word separator after a full stop when typeset professionally. (Similarly, when there are abbreviations that involve periods, the space after them can be slightly narrower than the normal word separator.)

The wider form of whitespace is not easy to get out of regular text editors and word processing software, so some people choose to emulate it by entering two regular word separators. (This is too wide, though, if we are being precise.)

The rule was definitely on the typewriter.

I’m sure it was for some people, and that’s what I used and learned in college too, but ever since then I’ve seen no end to “rules” about language that lose their qualifiers over time, are applied out of context, or are sometimes just not true and weren’t rules until someone misinterpreted some advice or just decided to demand their way was ‘correct’ and it somehow spread. It’s pretty surprising how many conventions we have that people consider canonical but didn’t used to be.

The Oxford comma wasn't a rule when I was a kid, but at least that rule has some good reasoning behind it!

It was a rule somewhere, right? It was printed in a style manual in 1905. (I am totally assuming you’re not 115 years old. ;) )

Ha! Perhaps I should have said "when/where." I was specifically taught the rule was optional. A brief perusal of the Wikipedia article on the subject helps me understand that it should have been taught as "situational." And I learned about Sir Roger Casement's "hanged on a comma," so that's cool.

Since it took me a minute to track down, here's the short of it so that I don't accidentally nerd-snipe anyone:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110820004307/https://www.funtri...

I'm just old enough to remember using a typewriter for school work. And at least on the typewriter I used, the period key produced a width of exactly a period. In other words, an extra space was absolutely required just to "fill out" the period. And the small period width allowed you to do a "proper" ellipsis.

I didn't quite realize that was the reason for the double space until these comments, though, as we were simply taught that it was required to put 2 spaces after a period.

The comma, btw, was slightly wider.

> Anyway. I loved emacs back in the day, and for a long time, but over many many years my .emacs file bloated up to like a megabyte.

emacs-bankruptcy court is now in session. mr. dahart would you like to say something/anything before we begin ?

Also learned two spaces and our class was taught on some ancient 8088’s