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Comment by dpifke | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

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.

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).

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