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Torben Gundtofte-Bruun
Asked: 2011-09-21 02:10:19 +0800 CST

Why do *nix folk like to use ``...'' rather than the " character?

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At the risk of being flamed, I'd like to understand why some people prefer to use a ``construction'' of accent and single quote characters rather than the "double-quote" character when quoting things?

Example:

Why do some users write quotes using ``weird'' quotes?

This is not command-line wizardry; I see this in written texts that are intended for humans to read. Here's an example I could quickly dig up. I find this construction ugly because it's asymmetrical, and because it abuses typographical characters for a purpose they weren't meant for. For some reason, this use of characters is mostly (exclusively?) done by Linux ((La)TeX?) users and not by the average computer user.

  1. If the intention is to create “curly quotes” then I don't get why only the opening quote is made "curly" using the grave accent (`) -- why is a plain apostrophe used for closing quotes, rather than the acute accent (´) which would make the whole thing symmetrical?

  2. If the intention is to create “curly quotes” then why are actual curly quotes (as created by MS Word) frowned upon? Modern computer systems handle actual curly quotes well, so it can't simply be a tradition from the Gopher days, can it?

  3. Why are two single characters used even though the same can be achieved with a single character?

special-characters

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The real reason (and what may be the root cause of the LaTeX usage) is that many pre-unicode unix fonts (both for the console and X), and two common Adobe Postscript encoding vectors, had typographic opening/closing quote glyphs at these positions, so 'this' would look like ’this’, and ``this'' looked like ‘‘this’’ or ‛‛this’’, which was (especially in a proportional font where these were only 2-3 pixels wide) as close to typographically correct as you could get back then.

    This goes back even further to typewriters, where the ' glyph would often be set at an angle to accomodate its use as an overstriking acute accent.

    See also:

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  2. One reason is probably the influence of TEX to the Linux world. In most flavors of TEX, the sequence `` creates a typographically correct opening double quote (“) and '' (two single quotes) or " create a typographically correct closing quote (”). So When you type

    ``Why do you always say `shut up' to me?''

    It actually yields

    “Why do you always say ‘shut up’ to me?”

    using TEX. (Perhaps with better kerning, though).

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  3. in *nix systems different quotes have different effects.

    using e.g.

    echo 'date'

    will write

    date

    to the output

    echo `date`

    will write e.g.

    Tue Sep 20 13:42:04 CEST 2011

    instead (so the output of the command "date")

    In general your assumptions are wrong that quotes start with a different character than what they end with - they always have to be ended with the same as the one they have started with.

    For e.g. the command "echo", you could also use multiple types of quotes. So let's say you want to show

    "this is a test"

    on the console, you can write

    echo '"this is a test"'

    You can also swap these quotes to produce single quotes.

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