In OS that I use on top of Slackware, that is Emacs we use two whitespaces after a dot to symbolize the end of sentence. You can use M-e (forward-sentence) and M-a (backward-sentence) to go to the end and the beginning of the sentence.

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It's not really a rule in US English anymore. In fact, most Manual of Styles used in America don't condone two spaces after periods. The two most common ones are the Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press Stylebook and neither recommend using double spaces after periods.

In fact, last year, Microsoft switched Word to flag double spaces after periods as incorrect (and we all know that when Microsoft makes a decision for the world, it sticks ).

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Yes, the first time I learned of this was when I first learned Emacs

I had to learn cursive too. I was basically told I wasn't smart enough for typing classes so I had to learn at home on my c64.

My mother was a typist and she taught us to type on manual typewriters using her old lessons which were on 45rpm vinyl records. I can still hear the posh gentleman's voice:

"Ay Ess Dee Eff Colon Ell Kay Jay, Ay Ess Dee Eff Colon Ell Kay Jay, Ay Ess Dee Eff Colon Ell Kay Jay, Ay Ess Dee Eff Colon Ell Kay Jay... CARRIAGE RETURN"

The further we get away from that (time-wise), the less sense standard keyboard layouts make...
Haha! Too funny.

But yes, I agree. Always 2 spaces after a full stop, but many online forums strip them out of your posts.

This is a HTML thing.

HTML by design will not display more than a single space unless you force it to with the nbsp code, this avoids unwanted spacing in the displayed text when the text and formatting are intermixed and may have extra white space in the source that should never be displayed in the output.


Not typing nbsp properly so I don't have to work out how to make it display as text and not the space

I've never seen 45rpm/77rpm records, only 33rpm.

But my grandma's old soviet Vega-101 could play all of these records, just with fixed rpm.

That's rude. But from my point a C64 gives more fun than a typewriter (although I like the old mechanical ones)

You had to be "college material" to get in the typing class in my high school, when I tried to they said "why, your not going to college". College material to them was sports scholarships.
I have poor eye hand coordination so besides being terrible at any sports my cursive was terrible too. I started using a cursive font in Speedscript (computer gazette type in word processor for the c64) when they started giving my crap about not using cursive

Yes, I remember that! My goodness, what an awesome piece of programming it was. A full-featured text processor, in 5K of RAM, and what a laundry-list of add-ons it spawned. I especially remember the spell checker, SpeedCheck; the article in the Gazette that announced it, explained what "dictionary compression" is (actually compressing a lexicon, using incremental encoding). (*)

The original SpeedScript appeared in 1984, when I was in high school. Five years later, when I was in college, I found someone editing her senior research project, using SpeedScript on a Commodore 64. She was quite the outlier in that environment, but the program served her purpose elegantly.

(*) If you're wondering where such a compression system would be useful, consider the locate/mlocate/slocate commands. When your Slackware Linux system runs "updatedb" at 4:40 AM, it builds a list of files and directories on your local system, then sorts their names. That includes lots of directory names, for pretty much every file not in your system's root (/) directory. The sorted list totally lends itself to incremental encoding. By the same token, reading the *locate database into RAM and then decompressing it, is much faster than reading an uncompressed list of files from I/O.

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Oh yeah, that 1- or 2-space thing. My experience says it's 2 spaces when the final form is mono-spaced and single-justified. Otherwise, you're dealing with proportional spacing, so the kerning algorithm will either reduce a double space-band to a single space (on the last line of a paragraph) or expand it into a non-integral space (for fully-justified text).