Why you should never use two spaces after a period

The canonical reply to this article, by Steve Losh:

http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/why-i-two-space/

Among other things, he points out that computers have a much easier time parsing sentences which are clearly separated by two spaces, and that some features in e.g. vim don't work well with single-spaced sentences.

Summary of the article's reasons to use one space between sentences:

1. Typographers and style manuals tell you to.

2. Two spaces were necessary when using monospace fonts; but now that everyone uses proportional fonts, it's no longer necessary.

3. It's ugly.

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I don't find these arguments very persuasive. I have my own aesthetic sense, and I don't need some authority to tell me what's ugly or not. I can tell that for myself, thank you very much. To me, two spaces between sentences look just fine.

Second, I find it easier to tell where one sentence ends and another sentence begins when they're separated by two spaces. A single space and a little tiny period is just not enough.. especially when reading at high speed, and when there are really long sentences.

If only one space separates sentences, and I want to skip to the next sentence, I'll have to read a lot more carefully than if there are two spaces -- when it becomes much more obvious where the separation is. Using one space in between sentences makes paragraphs look like one long run-on sentence.

I like the aesthetics of two spaces, as well. Especially when using a proportional font since a proportional space is narrower than an average character width. A "." and a skinny space doesn't provide much of a visual separation.

I've gotten over not liking seeing a single space from others, and others can get over seeing my double-spaces :)

Yeah. I'm still gonna use 2 spaces. It looks better to me.

Robin Williams devotes a chapter of her book, "The PC is not a Typewriter", on the subject. She concurs.

http://www.amazon.com/Pc-Not-Typewriter-Robin-Williams/dp/09...

I can't stand two spaces after periods. It gives me a weird twitch. I sometimes do a find-replace before even reading a document. It is a superfluous keystroke, but I think what really bothers me is that it just looks ugly and uneven to me.

Ironically, we're all reading this on the web, where browsers merrily remove superfluous white space. If every browser can agree on that, given how much they all disagree on, I'll take that as a pretty good endorsement for single-spacing.

This guy spent a long time building up a logical argument against using two spaces, then threw all his work out the window in the final paragraphs by concluding that the "aesthetics" of two spaces were too ugly for common use.

Never say never. This only applies to WYSIWG. When writing in plain text source formats, the two spaces enable tools to distinguish the end of a sentence from abbreviations and other uses of the period. For example, emacs uses this distinction for column filling and other text manipulations.

Using a single space is ambiguous; ambiguous is bad. Therefore two spaces is best in place text.

This, sirs, is why LaTeX asks you to differentiate between sentence-ending periods and non-sentence-ending periods in source code, and adds just a little bit of elasticity to the sentence-ending periods during compilation. The tools that make things beautiful know how to make things beautiful.

The rest of the time, there's:

(setq sentence-end-double-space nil)

>Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s.

except for programmers

And you sir, leave punctuations within quotation marks where they do not belong and use serial commas. I believe I need to read no further.