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Author’s friend’s comment is funny: ;; Basically, I was laboring under the impression that ;; `sentence-end-double-space' was telling Emacs the /right/

by dahart 3y ago

Author’s friend’s comment is funny: ;; Basically, I was laboring under the impression that ;; `sentence-end-double-space' was telling Emacs the /right/ way to do ;; end-of-sentence spacing, but really it's just letting it know how sentences ;; work. So setting it to nil lets you do sentence-level stuff, even on people ;; who are /wrong/. So great. I assume they were mostly kidding and this was only meant to be funny, but I learned the 2 spaces thing in college and then didn’t discover until a couple years ago that it had fallen out of fashion decades earlier, even before I went to college. IIRC the reason for the 2 spaces rule is because you need it in print, for non-fixed-width fonts, where the space character is really narrow. I think I even read that there never was a 2-space rule for fixed-width fonts? (*Edit just to say I think I (mis)remembered this story completely backward, and the corrections below are accurate. Print had different sized spaces already, typewriters need 2 to match.) 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. (That might* be a slight exaggeration, but I’m not sure.) I can’t maintain it anymore. I probably have a very very enormous list of bad emacs defaults.

LanceH 3y ago
The rule was definitely on the typewriter.
- dahart 3y ago
  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.
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    The Oxford comma wasn't a rule when I was a kid, but at least that rule has some good reasoning behind it!
    - dahart 3y ago
      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. ;) )
      - IggleSniggle 3y ago
        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.funtrivia.com/askft/Question43706.html http://web.archive.org/web/20110820004307/https://www.funtri...
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  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.
gwd 3y ago
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.
- bspammer 3y ago
  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.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Speaking only for myself, but yes I do think all modern typography gets this wrong and looks terrible as a result.
- dahart 3y ago
  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 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1527-6 [2] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/spaces-after-period/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/spaces-after-period/
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    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.
spookthesunset 3y ago
Also learned two spaces and our class was taught on some ancient 8088’s
dpifke 3y ago
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".
- alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
  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.
  - accoil 3y ago
    Would need to be easy to type (e.g by pressing space twice).
    - alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
      I was thinking could use abbrevs but it must expand word chars, not spaces.
      - dpifke 3y ago
        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.
      - accoil 3y ago
        Huh, didn't know abbrev had that limitation (wonder why?). Gave it a go in espanso (https://espanso.org/ 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).
kqr 3y ago
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.)
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
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.
- Finnucane 3y ago
  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.
eichin 3y ago
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 https://github.com/skx/dotfiles )
signa11 3y ago
> 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 ?

by dahart 3y ago

LanceH 3y ago

The rule was definitely on the typewriter.

dahart 3y ago
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.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  The Oxford comma wasn't a rule when I was a kid, but at least that rule has some good reasoning behind it!
  - dahart 3y ago
    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. ;) )
    - IggleSniggle 3y ago
      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.funtrivia.com/askft/Question43706.html http://web.archive.org/web/20110820004307/https://www.funtri...
IggleSniggle 3y ago
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.

gwd 3y ago

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.

bspammer 3y ago
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.
- adastra22 3y ago
  Speaking only for myself, but yes I do think all modern typography gets this wrong and looks terrible as a result.
dahart 3y ago
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 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1527-6 [2] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/spaces-after-period/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/spaces-after-period/
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  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.

spookthesunset 3y ago

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

dpifke 3y ago

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".

alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
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.
- accoil 3y ago
  Would need to be easy to type (e.g by pressing space twice).
  - alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
    I was thinking could use abbrevs but it must expand word chars, not spaces.
    - dpifke 3y ago
      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.
    - accoil 3y ago
      Huh, didn't know abbrev had that limitation (wonder why?). Gave it a go in espanso (https://espanso.org/ 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).

kqr 3y ago

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.)

BeFlatXIII 3y ago

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.

Finnucane 3y ago
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.

eichin 3y ago

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 https://github.com/skx/dotfiles )

signa11 3y ago

> 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 ?