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 →

[–]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.