: Aligning cross-staff stems when the same pitch is involved with Lilypond I am engraving a bit for piano, where there is a chord spanning cross staff (played with the left hand). One of the pitches of the chord also appears

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This answer gave hints as to how to modify my score, but even with attempted tweaks, I couldn't get what I want from it. So I set out to finding another solution, which is the following :
version "2.18.0"

rightHand = relative c'' {
clef "treble"
<< { g4 f4 f2} crossStaff {s4 <c f>2 <c f>4} >>
}

leftHand = relative c {
clef "bass"
stemDown {r4 <<a'2 new Voice{voiceOne once hideNotes a4 }>> a4}
}

score {
new PianoStaff
<<
new Staff = "upper" rightHand
new Staff = "lower" leftHand
>>
layout {
context {
PianoStaff
consists #Span_stem_engraver
}
}
}

The result is as follows :

which is what I was looking for.
Snippet available here on lilybin. The trick is to add an invisible voice.
My problem now, is that I had the idea for that from the lilypond snippet repository, and I have no idea why it works :(
I still posted an answer, because it technically answer my question. But I'd like as well to know why. Someone does ?

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One solution would be to insert once override NoteColumn.force-hshift = -1.5 immediately before that first <c f>2:

But as you see, this still comes out looking a bit strange; a sight reader may well get something wrong if they're suddenly confronted with this. You may thus want to tweak some other notes.
Or, depending on the score, I may recommend putting the left hand chords all in the bass clef. You'd have ledger lines, but the notation would be far clearer.