That said, it's a stupid argument. If you want to two-space, fine, but be aware that most people believe and understand you're living in the typographic stone age alongside people who indent their paragraphs and use Whitesmiths.
Two-spacing is a result of monospace typewriters, which couldn't provide the "space and a half" spacing that traditional typesetting put between sentences, however these days most of the people I see doing two-spacing are in their forties or older, and probably used a typewriter before they used a computer.
Even when using a monospace font, I prefer single spacing. Why? It's easier to be consistent. If I forget to two space, or have a typo and miss a two-space, short of creating a really nasty regex I'm not going to be able to find it.
It's going to be hard if you are emotionally attached to that tool, though.
Is there really any reason to disparage people who don't agree with you? Just accept it as a personal preference or something done because that's how people were taught and move on. Not everything needs to be a "but I'm right" thing.
At least on my Chrome on Windows 7 the fonts look horrible. I've had that in other places too, I wonder what's wrong with my setup.
The fade in happens after you scroll past the relevant heading for me (Firefox, Ubuntu 12.04, 1080p screen).
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8403291/stevelosh.png
and
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8403291/stevelosh2.png
show what I mean.
I actually do like the marginalia, like in Tufte's books, side boxes as a sort of commentary or summary of the main text. I'd prefer them to always be there. Lets face it, on a widescreen monitor of modest resolution, the page looks thin otherwise.
What browser are you using?
(Note: it will overlap if you resize the window horizontally, but should fix itself as soon as you scroll a pixel in any direction)
I beg your pardon.
"Gay marriage? After having it drummed into my head for the better part of ten years that it's a bad thing, I'm never going to change for anyone."
I can't remember what my college course required because I only had to go five or six times to prove my proficiency. (Yes, my university's computing program required a typing course because they had students that couldn't touch type.)
I beg to differ. I find that two-spacing feels wrong even in monospace. And even code is not write-only, so it's a stab in my eye every time I 'develop'.
Also, since both HTML and markdown use single-newline chars as word - not paragraph - delimiters, the semantic argument doesn't hold because I'll counter it with [0].
[0] http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/
But it wraps at the full width of my terminal (80-some characters per visual line), which is too long. And it won't display a partial line at the bottom of the screen. That is, if something wraps to 3 visual lines, but starts on the second row from the bottom, instead of displaying the first 2 visual lines, it shows two '@'s.
This prevents me from using the one-sentence-per-line approach nicely. Any Vim warriors know a solution?
set display+=lastlineNowadays, I use monospace fonts everywhere, and that second space looks downright horrible, and completely extraneous. I feel like the author here countered a fairly well-reasoned article (Slate) with a very subjective point.
Regarding the note on Vim's sentence handling, I'll probably deal with the occasional failure on a word like Mr. rather than having to type out that extra space after every sentence.
Now, traditionally, to increase readability, typographers used 1 and a half spaces after the end of a sentence. It looks pretty good and so someone decided that would be 2 on a monospace typewriter. However, our PCs are slightly (ish - not by much) more powerful than said typewriters and can work out when to use 1 and a half spaces if necessary.
If I may, I call your attention to the first of the two sentences endings in the quoted snippet.
So your sentence above ends just after the characters e-t-c, right?
Or do we use a period for other things than just ending sentences?
He sets up some arguments against two-space and counters them, but I still don't see what the point of two-space (or n-space). From the post all I can gleam is 1) it looks better in his opinion, 2) Vim sentence selection. Neither of which are convincing arguments to me I'm afraid...
Typewriters used monospaced fonts. The old consensus on the "two spaces" rule came about because it made things easier to read on typewriters. Source code editors are also monospaced, so why not the same rule for the same reason?
> It doesn’t matter what editor you use. Vim, Emacs, TextMate, Sublime Text, Eclipse, Gedit, Notepad++? All of them use monospaced fonts.
No they don't. What silliness is this?
From the author's list, Sublime Text, Eclipse, Gedit, and Notepad++ all support proportional fonts.
Of the other editors I use frequently, Komodo IDE, Visual Studio, UltraEdit/UEStudio, XML Marker 2, and MarkdownPad among others all support proportional fonts.
So write in a monospaced font if that's what you prefer, but nobody is making you do it.
The only thing that doesn't work in a proportional font is column alignment tricks. (Basic indentation works fine.) That problem is easy to solve by not using column alignment at all. I find code easier to read and much easier to maintain when it doesn't use column alignment. When reading someone else's code that does use column alignment, I just switch to a monospaced font for that file.
I wrote on this at more length here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4625340
If you're heavy into column alignment styles as in the examples from that comment, then a proportional font won't be for you. But if not, give it a try. It may seem strange at first but give yourself a chance to get used to it. You may find you like it, and if not, no harm done.
I used to use two spaces before the web because that's how I learned it. Way back when I realized that browsers collapse consecutive spaces into one I stopped using them. This argument makes me rethink my position. It also reminds me that I really need to learn more of vim's shortcuts.
In the UK, we were not taught to use two spaces after a full stop, but as my text files are for me only, they are fed through a formatting program before sharing, I may try this.
Use of 'semantic line feeds' obviates the issue. See
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642395
Random information: the Bash formatting utility follows the two spaces convention. The 'par' program uses one space. On Ubuntu...
keith@xeon:~$ fmt textfile | gedit
cat textfile | par j | gedit
Actually, it doesn't. TeX (the actual typesetter; LaTeX is a macro system on top) inserts a space that is slightly more stretchable than the space between words.
Anyhow, the two-space thing is sort of interesting trivia: http://www.techwr-l.com/archives/9907/techwhirl-9907-01344.h...
What is this broken cache-incompatible time-tracking system he is using?
> Not only is it not a large portion of your keystrokes, but the space bar has your two strongest digits dedicated solely to it!
double-tapping a key is harder to execute than other key pairings.
> Well that’s not right! Vim can’t easily tell the difference between the period after “Mr” and the end of a sentence. > Two-spacing provides more semantic information,
If this is your concern, it's far more appropriate to use a different symbol/glyph for non-breaking dots.
> So the next time you see that arrogant Slate article, feel free to be arrogant right back.
True. That Slate author's writings are unjustifiably smug.
(Not to say that this is really a petty issue, I found the OP interesting enough, but it's about as important as spaces and tabs in the large domain of writing in general)
The vim ambiguity is part of the greater English punctuation suckage. If I end a sentence in Jr. or St., am I supposed to double up on the periods on the end, or will that just make me look stupid? I already had a period followed by a comma there, which looks pretty bad, and "My personal hero is Martin Luther King Jr.." just seems wrong.
Also, I think I'm supposed to write a comma after a quotation, but I would have done that I would have written '..",'. That's pretty bad, and only compounded by the period at the end. I'm not sure that it's in the right place, either - should it be inside the quotation marks according to the normal rule or can I put it outside the quotation marks to avoid ambiguity? Why is it so difficult just to write a sentence without it going horribly awry?
If you also want to end your sentences with two periods or separate thoughts with two commas, go for it.
Please just don't pretend it is somehow proper or logical. As long as we're clear that you're doing it your own weird way just because... I see no harm. Carry on, two-space warrior! shrugs
I beg to differ- as someone who DID get RSI-stricken thumbs from typing, even one space occasionally feels too much, thankyouverymuch.
The two space convention originally became popular to match the practice of inserting wider spaces between sentences in print, but that has more or less fallen out of use.
In many ways, simple typographic conventions are also more esthetical. Does there need to be a distinction between spaces that separate words and spaces that separate sentences? The additional semantic markup isn't worth the extra complexity in many cases. Having two different conventions also adds complexity. Single spaces could eventually become the only format people need to know about, but two spaces couldn't.
Did we need so much text?
Two spaces after end of a sentence © GNU coding standards
This is an example of a typical geek habit of jumping on the edge case and trying to use it to disprove a well-meaning article. That Slate article isn't for you; nobody cares or judges your Latex/HTML formatting.
Extra pointless bytes are extra and pointless.
(And, yes, I realise they will exist in the previous versions. And, no, it doesn't matter. I just like imposing my will on this to make up for the fact that I am currently single and lonely. I also like consistency, and if people are going to be consistent, they may as well be consistent in a way I like.)
moron, your account was hellbanned 72 days ago.
lean, your account was hellbanned 345 days ago.
But the author doesn't like the competition.
:-)
But, more importantly, it's because people that don't two-space are big old dummies.