Dot Space Space
I have a confession to make. I used to put two spaces after each sentence, as it used to be done by typewriter typists before computers [citation needed].
The moment when I started to form this habit was around 2010. I was
young and easy to impress, and I was picking up more advanced Emacs
use working on the TeX source for my diploma thesis. While editing
these large chunks of free-form text was when I discovered the
fill-paragraph function, otherwise known as M-q, for automatically
breaking text at the correct column width. This is very useful for
editing text files, so it quickly became a habit to press M-q often.
I’m still using it right now, in fact.
Now after a while of using this feature, I started to observe that this didn’t work exactly how I thought. Readjusting text where one line ends with a full stop, it would surprisingly add two spaces in the middle after breaking.
This text:
Hello world.
This is a text.
Would turn into that text after a press of M-q:
Hello world. This is a text.
Then somewhere in Emacs documentation, I found key bindings jump back
and forth between sentences (M-a, M-e), and these also rely on
double-spaces to tell apart sentence ends from abbreviations (e.g. as
in Dr. Seuss).
I did not end up picking up these shortcuts, but it was enough for me
to rationalize the double spaces. In reality of course, I only started
with that habit so that M-q would not break the otherwise consistent
spacing style accidentally.
I used this for about 10 years now, and of course it didn’t elude me that I was the only one doing that, but it’s hard to put down old habits.
Recently, I found what I think is the remedy - M-q is actually
configurable in Emacs, and the old habit of pressing M-q will now
just fix my sentences to single-spaces again going forward.
This is what is needed:
(setq sentence-end-double-space nil)
What do we learn from this story? I’m not sure. Maybe that old habits are hard to shake. Some quirks creep in without you noticing and a tiny change might fix them.
M-q