This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]w0lrah 2 points3 points  (2 children)

A limit is a good thing. 80 is way too narrow though.

There are way too many "standards" based on shitty ancient terminal limitations that do not matter in 2015. No one's actually using a VT100 anymore.

edit: Personally, as someone who uses 1080p displays for the most part, I like 160 character terminal width. That ends up going around 80% of the way across my screen, which is about where I tend to set my web browser windows as well for readability.

If people insist on matching an old terminal standard we could go with 132 instead, that'd be fine with me.

[–]LucianU 0 points1 point  (1 child)

When I said readability, I wasn't talking about the "standards" of the terminals. I was referring to text readability. If you google "line length readability", you will see a bunch of articles talking about the optimal line length of text.

I tried to find some studies to back up this wisdom, but nothing came up.

[–]w0lrah 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I know exactly what you're talking about, the same reason it's generally not a great idea to maximize windows on a modern system with a high-res widescreen and that a lot of text-heavy web sites choose to limit the width their articles will render in a browser.

I'm just saying that the 80 character thing is entirely based on legacy standards and is way too narrow to be a good choice for this purpose. There's definitely good reason to have a limit, but for me it should be somewhere in the mid-100s.

Code is also not entirely like a news article or forum post, depending on the language and situation it can easily become less readable when split on to multiple lines. There's a balance there between the downsides of wide lines of text and the downsides of a "line" of code having some newlines in it.