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The Stack Exchange policy seems to be to disallow edits of fewer than six characters. However, often in technical subjects an edit of a single character can make a critical difference.

I just experienced this here, where I wanted to correct a key-stroke sequence for a computer operation. The correction amounted to a single character, changing M-x to C-x. The hack I came up with, and for which I am embarrassed to have had to resort, was to add a sequence of x's to the end of the post. My intent was to follow-up that with a second edit to delete the x's. Quite a kludge.

Please either provide me guidance on how to properly perform these types of edits, or consider changing the policy for some or all Stack Exchange sites.

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  • I would expect this to be common on SO, CodeReview, and other code-related stacks. – Jeff Zeitlin Jan 11 '18 at 20:24
  • @JeffZeitlin: Quite. That's why I was surprised and motivated to post this question here. – user1404316 Jan 11 '18 at 21:33
  • @DonaldDuck: It wouldn't "change the meaning of the post". The post as written makes no sense, in that M-x d is meaningless in that compute program context. The consequence of leaving the comment alone is that it remains a useless and misleading comment. – user1404316 Jan 11 '18 at 21:36
  • Per Servy's "mark as duplicate" action, StackExchange's expectation seems to be that I should have just added a comment about the error, and what the correction should be. However, my sense is that plenty of people read answers, but not comments. – user1404316 Jan 11 '18 at 21:39

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