3 ms·
Prior art on writing line oriented prose comes from one B. Kernighan, no less! Via this blog post: https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/
by gorgoiler 1y ago
Prior art on writing line oriented prose comes from one B. Kernighan, no less! Via this blog post:
https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/ https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/
> Start each sentence on a new line. Make lines short, and break lines at natural places, such as after commas and semicolons, rather than randomly. Since most people change documents by rewriting phrases and adding, deleting and rearranging sentences, these precautions simplify any editing you have to do later.
— Brian Kernighan, 1974
- gregabbott 1y agoRelated HN Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642395
- kps 1y agoThis is how all the Unix documents were written. See e.g. https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc/cacm/p1 https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc/cacm/p...
- ThisNameIsTaken 1y agoI've been doing this for some time now and it indeed makes editing text in vim easy. Just `dd` and `p`. And as the article mentions, diffing is much cleaner. There's a caveat however, if you comment a line (to keep the thought, but see how it would work without) some Markdown parsers will interpret it as an empty line, and thus create a new paragraph. It then becomes necessary to remove one of the semantic newlines, which looks rather messy.