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On a related note: At one point I switched to working exclusively on a laptop and after a while realized that the smaller screen had forced me to write better code. I wrote smaller methods, made smaller files, kept my concepts together, the whole nine yards. I even wrote better tests since that helped me keep my work small. It didn't last; I'm writing this on a 27" monitor, but I think that has more to do with bad la…
I will add that it’s also useful to have as much text as possible so you can see the flow, the context and the “context of the context.” But I find this insight more or less convincing so I guess the ideal writing screen is thin and tall. Sadly, that’s the opposite of what horizontal monitors encourage. This might be another benefit of physical notebooks.
+1 about the tall and narrow, especially for editing. I used to work from my friend's office who has these giant monitor that can pivot 90 degrees and I was easily 1.5x or 2x more productive given how much text was on the screen (almost and entire section of the book), and so I didn't have to scroll much...
Did anybody else just narrow down your browser to try HN that way?
I could imagine this trick helps. In my experience, when I try to convert a text into tweets, it gets more concise. I'm often baffled how much I can condense information down to 280 characters.
This seems to be kind of a complex topic, with a number of variables. Here is a study: How physical text layout affects reading from screen https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220208446_How_physi... A quote from the Discussion section: "Most of the studies on line length report faster reading with longer lines, and point to the number of characters as the variable responsible for the differences, rather than phy…
> In any case, it's probably best to refer to the scientific literature.
You might not think so if you read the literature review which takes up most of that paper. The literature covered is generally focused on questions of no obvious interest and then, even in its own terms, finds little or no effect. Particularly funny is the paper (Youngman and Scharff (1998), covered in §2.7) comparing the independent effect of physical line length vs physical margin length. Or in other words, they investigated whether it's faster to (1) read six inches of text with half an inch of blank page to the right of the text, or to (2) read six inches of text with a full inch of blank page to the right of the text.
The paper you cite also goes out of its way to express the authors' dismay over the extreme nature of one experiment invalidating the finding they wish to support:
> The study also fails to replicate [the finding of] Dyson and Kipping (1998a) and earlier studies that more characters per line can result in faster reading. The difference may be due to the extreme nature of the longest line, i.e. 132 characters in 12 point Arial (rather than 10 point Arial used by Dyson and Kipping). The line length therefore not only has more characters but is also physically longer because of the larger type size.
later:
> A setting with no margin would not be typical practice, but may have been included to assess an extreme of a variable in a similar manner to using 132 characters per line.
How unfair!
Of course, as I read your comment on Hacker News, it contains a line of 130 characters.
This paper isn't even trying to address the questions you think it's addressing.
I could imagine this trick helps. In my experience, when I try to convert a text into tweets, it gets more concise. I'm often baffled how much I can condense information down to 280 characters.
I've found that when I condense an impressive amount of information down to 280 characters, the compression is lossy. People only pick up one tidbit out of the several that I've packed in; or maybe they'll come away with a completely wrong interpretation. Hell, even when I come back to my own writing, I find that it's too clever by half and I can't extract the nuance that I expected to be clear.
I wouldn't try to convert everything to one tweet. Often, I need to split it into a thread.
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alphasmart+neo&t=ffab&iax=images&i...