You Emacs and orgmode users have been bad boys (and girls)!!

I have been looking for a way to get multiple lines on org-mode table cells when exported to HTML for about 5 years now, and even when I asked I didn't get answers, perhaps I didn't ask correctly. I didn't mind having extra long columns in the editor, but wanted some escape sequences that cause the output to break into multiple lines in the table cells. Imagine my surprise when [asked](https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/w9hxp3/is_there_some_escape_sequence_that_can_used_to/) a few days ago and got an [answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/w9hxp3/is_there_some_escape_sequence_that_can_used_to/ihx3dmn/) and got a response from u/redblobgames. Big up to him (I hope I haven't misgendered **him** 😮). There is the solution, right there in the manual https://orgmode.org/manual/Quoting-HTML-tags.html and you guys kept it from me for ages. I even thought it was a new feature recently introduced into org but it seems to have been around forever - and you guys kept it from me. You have been bad naughty boys. No cookies for you. https://orgmode.org/guide/HTML-Export.html PS. We should find out soon enough I've misgendered u/redblobgames 😮🤔😉

> Big up to him (I hope I haven't misgendered him 😮). You can just say "them" if you don't know. It sort of exists for that purpose. :)

The fun in Emacs is to figure it out yourself ;)

I use Emacs > 10 years, have a lot of similar experiences, still not used to it but consider it as a kind of tax/compensation for my too often stupid questions. Reading, and specially rereading, `info emacs`/`org`/etc. sucks but is really necessary to learn about our tools. For what it doesn't tell us I use describe-function, describe-variable, source code, reddit.com, stackexchange.com, both emacs wiki's, online search machines etc, and sometimes equally efficient animal offerings. Wish you good luck with new discoveries and unexpected help.

I hadn't thought of using a macro for it. That was new to me too, so I put it in Emacs News because I know lots of people have wondered about it before. :) Someone should probably put it in a reasonable place in the documentation or FAQ. I wonder where it makes sense to find it...

I'm Dutch and have learned that 'them' is plural. Is that wrong ?

Yes; [they](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/they#Pronoun) and [them](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/them#Pronoun) have had singular ~~forums~~ forms for literally hundreds of years.

I can't remember that I've seen/noticed it before and think that this kind of using 'they' and 'them' is confusing, but thank you for learning me something about it.

I'm actually surprised that redblob uses emacs lmao. i used his a* tutorial on his website a while ago

Wait until you find out what *else* we've been keeping from you.

They is formally plural but can be used as a generic for an individual and has been since at least the time of middle English.

No, it is correct, but they is also nowadays commonly used to refer to defined people of unknown gender. For example, you could say "Big up to them" even if there's a singular person you're big upping

I feel like the thing people cite for this is not the same as using they as a pronoun for a known person of unknown gender. What people usually bring up is like that Michelle Obama quote, but that's referring to "the nominee", ie the holder of a position, as opposed to a singular person that cannnot change

shhh!

They didn't learn you something, they taught you something:)

You could also use `prettify-symbols-mode` to make it look nicer. (add-hook 'org-mode-hook (lambda () (push '("@@html<br>@@" . ?⮨) prettify-symbols-alist) (prettify-symbols-mode))) (except that Unicode char takes up more width than a regular character so that ruins the nice org-table rendering, so maybe pick another one)

While singular they did exist before it is the default only the last few years, before the default on the internet was him.

I'd guess that >95% of the people here would interpret "big up to them" as plural. So this hurts the ability to comprehend the content IMHO. But I know that this is a delicate subject, especially in the woke USA. I'd prefer using a neutral phrase like "thanks to $USERNAME" or similar.

Downvote for weasel words.

It takes some getting used to, but saving the pain of having to gender everyone you refer to is worth it.

Please keep discussion on topic.

You're "concerned" enough about gender labels to point it out (odd considering you could just as easily make your statement without any mention of gender), and yet the title of your post assumes two genders! Oh no! What will we do now!?

Why surprised?

It is correct, but only one use case. If you want to avoid ambiguity there's other ways of referring to people as well. Don't fret it; English is pretty malleable.

In the last word of the previous sentence the OP is clearly referring to one user. So in the next sentence using "them" would be pretty clearly singular. e.g. "I was helped by Sally. I like them." Isn't ambiguous.

[deleted]

TL;DR: RTFM

> Please keep discussion on topic

You ~~can~~ should say this to the moderator who commented in this thread as well. ;-)

I've used singular they/them by default when I didn't know the gender for as long as I can remember, at least 20 years. I wonder if it's a regional difference? Admittedly, I have no idea about the internet default. It has definitely taken on a new life lately though. It's only been the past few years where some of my family has deemed me an immoral liberal for my usage.

It most probably is a regional difference. I knew nothing about the singular they until the internet picked it up a few years ago. I always wrote he/she in text that needed to be gender neutral.

This is only a woke thing recently. In the USA I've used singular they/them for at least 20 years, and it has nothing to do with gender politics. Sometimes you genuinely don't know someone's gender, and English as it is spoken in the USA has had a solution for this my entire life. I'd be shocked if >95% is correct when you include context.

Yeah. Strange how certain off topic material is allowed and other stuff is not. Feels arbitrary. I would never sarcastically point that out, though.

They're the same account :-) Hence the quoting Edit: unless you meant the top comment, it's surprisingly difficult to know who mods what on my client

No harm done, it just felt odd that 5 minutes prior you were commenting that but decided the thread needed another off-topic top-level comment

Yep, singular they by default unless someone specifies or requests otherwise.

q.e.d.

u/jsled is the hypocritical moderator, not I.

I'd be interested in an objective test. Of course, if you give a particular context right away and nearby, chances are that people are only irritated but not assuming the wrong gender. I try to optimize for the legibility so that my content is transferred to the reader's brain in an optimal way.

Maybe it is just me but "Sally helped me. I like her" feels a bit less ambiguous imo. I think it might also be that the sentence is split because "her" still feels a bit ambiguous so maybe "Sally helped me and thus I like them" or "Sally helped me and thus I like her" feel a bit better although I still think "them" feels a bit ambiguous relative to "her" there.

Not only do I use emacs (for over 30 years), many of the pages on my site are made with org-mode. The others are made with my own custom modes. For example, the [A* page](https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/a-star/introduction.html) is written in a custom xhtml-style mode, and you can see the source [here](https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/a-star/introduction.bxml). The [A* implementation guide](https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/a-star/implementation.html) is written in org-mode, and you can see the source [here](https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/a-star/implementation.org). I learned about trick the OP asked about because many of my pages have interactive elements, and I wanted to be able to type them more easily. Looking through the org mode manual I learned about `@@html` and then I also learned about macros, and tried combining them, and it worked :-)

Here people always say He, and when I learned English on the internet everyone also said He. Only recently people started being angry when someone says He when he doesn't know the gender.

Those are great resources. Python programming and high quality org documents are something I am getting into.

That's super cool! I actually was inspired by your articles to start one on MCTS since most current articles I find to be pretty terrible (missing details, difficult to follow code, over explanation of things that don't need them, not enough explanation of things that do, organization, etc) and your articles are the best out there. Maybe I should take another page out of your book and write it in org mode instead of vscode :)

Not too many people use Emacs, and I would expect the number to be even lower among game developers since most gamedev is done on/for windows

One fun trick with org-mode, if you are writing examples in javascript, is that you can *tangle* the code on the page into a js file, and then *load* that very same code to run on the page. That way the examples that run on the page are using the code that's shown on the page, and they never get out of sync.

Ah, so that's what you're doing for code snippets. That's super neat! I use Nim mostly, which can compile to js, so I will take a look

Red blob games, if it’s the guy who does the website, is a man. And he makes some interesting blog posts.

I think a better example is something like "If any student aces this exam, **they** will automatically pass the class." It fills the same roll as "he or she" in a sentence.

"I'm Dutch and have learned that 'them' is plural. Is that wrong ?" No. But it can be used in the abstract for unknown persons: "If you find lost property you should try to find out who it belongs to so that the item can be returned to them". However, this is still quite ugly and "If you find lost property you should try to find out who it belongs to so that the item can be returned to its owner" would, IMO, sound better. Overloading "they" and "them" with usage for "unknown gender" makes for some confusing and very ugly sentence construction, often for no purpose. "He or she" or "his or her" works better in practice.

>Overloading "they" and "them" with usage for "unknown gender" makes for some confusing and very ugly sentence construction, often for no purpose. "He or she" or "his or her" works better in practice. The first example you give is "natural", for a lack of a better word, in that it doesn't take too much eye squinting to understand it. But I agree with your sentence, extending they/them to be a singular pronoun for people gets very confusing if your writing is sloppy/unclear and let's be honest, even native speakers write unclear text. Richard Stallman has good examples of text that use singular they/them which require two brains and a half (probably more) to decipher and understand said text. As a non-native, his examples scare me and I'm left ever more confused.

I'm from India, and even my school books have "he/she", and "his/her" written instead of gender neutral terms, so I won't blame ya.