This was originally published on Hatch (Medium for Medium employees) on September 25, 2014. See Hatching Inside Medium for context on this collection.

Would you rather have

$100000000000

or

$100,000,000,000?

Clearly the latter, right? Even though the numbers are exactly the same, the second one looks so much more enticing.

The secret? Thousand delimiters, nicely grouping the digits together.

Just this week, Gianni built a custom Soy function and added them to the stats page, and then we did the same to the post publish screen, and recommend milestone emails:

…which is the best thing ever.

And it requires simply turning {$value} into {$value|thousandSeparator}.

Any number we show that’s not fuzzy (e.g. 1.5K or 3M) should have thousand delimiters. If you see one that doesn’t… please let me know, or file an issue and CC me/Gianni!

Thank you in advance! (And please do the same if you see something anywhere that’s not sentence cased.)