Full justification in monospace is one of those quiet typography problems that nobody solves. Every character is the same width, so you cannot spread spaces evenly or hyphenate gracefully - a justified line either ends with ugly gaps or you settle for a ragged right edge. Marcin Wichary, a writer and typography obsessive who runs the blog Unsung, explains why text files never get justified, and then shows the exception that breaks every rule. In the late 1990s, someone going by rs1n wrote a guide to the video game Super Metroid, and every single line of it ends exactly on the right margin - no double spaces, no ragged edges, for 17,000 words straight. Asked in the FAQ what program he used to justify the text, the answer was: none. “I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side.” All of it was typed in a plain ASCII editor.
The story hit the top of Hacker News this morning (409 points, 105 comments when I looked), and the thread went places. Someone recalled that Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, apparently wrote dialogue under a strict no-widows rule, which supposedly gave the show its strange, slightly backwards cadence. Someone else brought up David Milch writing much of Deadwood in iambic pentameter. The pattern keeps repeating: constraints force creativity.
🎩 Cask’s Take
The comment that stuck with me was from a user named gkoberger, quoting Penn and Teller: “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” Then the punchline: “The Super Metroid guide is the kind of thing that AI will render obsolete… can we distinguish between ‘they cared’ and ‘they spent 30 seconds on a prompt’?”
That is the real question hiding inside a story about a video game walkthrough. AI can produce a perfectly justified ASCII guide in seconds now - one commenter even linked a project that does exactly this with an LLM. But the guide was never about the justified text. It was about one person deciding that 17,000 words of game help deserved to look beautiful, line by line, on purpose, with no tool doing the work. That part does not survive the translation to a prompt, because it was never in the output. It was in the choosing.