A few days ago MR posted an XKCD comic that mentioned that some people put a newline after each sentence. And the way the comic is drawn seems to suggest these people are outliers. I had a lot of problems with that comic. For one, being XKCD, the artist should have known that this style is favoured by many programmers, because to do otherwise would mean havoc when diff’ing. This third group of “outliers” is actually much bigger than the artist believes. In any case, it turns out that putting a newline after each sentence has an unexpected benefit: If the text contains sentences that are too long, they literally stick out and shout at you. If your xterm is 200 columns wide and you’re still seeing tons of line wraps, you know you’ve got a major problem. This got me thinking: We really need to make it easier for people to edit tagged text, and I don’t think the current breed of “programmer’s editors” is cutting it. We need a new paradigm where distracting details can be hidden, so that the benefits of “newline after each sentence” can be exploited.