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Understandable. Looking at my activity columns, it pushes 
out one or two chars versus "yesterday" (the previous 
common long entry), except on "minutes ago", which "ago" is 
entirely extra. This will obviously depend on font etc, but I see 
the issue.

Alternatives off the top of my head:

* prefix future intervals with "in ". This doesn't really help me, 
because then past ones are still easy to confuse (for our use, 
the fact that "ago" pushes out is actually very helpful for 
visually identifying overdue items).

* prefix with sign (+/-). Downside: it's not so pretty anymore, 
and negative dates ("- 7 days") aren't particularily intuitive.

* abbreviate the common pretty words "hours, minutes" 
to "hrs, mins". at least in our setup this makes it so worst 
case is an additional single character pushout by "ago". 
(Again, compared to "yesterday".) Downsides: "months" still 
pushes 2+ chars, and has no good abbreviation I can think of, 
and abbreviations are just less pretty.

* make the "ago/in" suffix/prefix optional by argument to 
pretty. I dislike adding arguments, and this doesn't address 
the fact that the default behavior is ambiguous, but if my use 
is the exception to most use of pretty-printing intervals, I'm ok 
with it.

Basically, for our needs "ago" is a very good solution. (it even 
helped on the activity column, because some users were 
misunderstanding th column to mean "work activity time 
spent on this item". We changed the title to "Last Update" as 
well, so that's not a strong endorsement for "ago".) But I 
would accept this as optional behavior via an argument or 
using abbreviations as my next choices.