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But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more

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Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more

#71

Post by Normal_gaussian »

colechristensen wrote: post #24
alex_young wrote: post #7

Isn’t there some merit to the notion that long lines are typically either overly verbose or mentally challenging to understand?

Splitting one line into many because of character limits can also make an action overly verbose or mentally challenging. In some cases, unreasonable gymnastics needs to be done to get 80 character lines, turning good variable and function names into shorter worse ones or adding functions just to hide characters.

most languages support simply adding "visual" newlines in the middle of a "logical" line; I tend to do this to improve readability - could this be done to avoid your long lines?

Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more

#72

Post by GuiA »

js2 wrote: post #49

The problem with overly wide lines is that it hurts readability because it's harder to find the next line when scanning your eyes from right back to left. Take it from the world of books: This study may be helpful: > This study examined the effects of line length on reading performance. Reading rates were found to be fastest at 95 cpl. Readers reported either liking or disliking the extreme line lengths (35 cpl, 95 c…

Yeah, when you do typesetting you quickly learn that ~10 words per line is a sweet spot for readability.

Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more

#73

Post by _jal »

winrid wrote: post #19
krferriter wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of terminals just set that as the default window width. No real reason for it, I usually snap to half the screen width immediately anyways. That turns out to about 105-120 characters width. Some people might just not resize it most of the time. Especially on Mac where efficient window management just isn't a thing.

A note on your last sentence. Once I used my Win10 laptop at an interview at Apple. The interviewer saw me drag one window the the side, snap it, and then select another window to fill in the space. He said, wow, Windows is really nice! :)

I actually really hate that behavior.

I arrange windows to provide the information I need. That's usually a strip on the left to show the mailbox pane of my mail window, a strip below that for slack channels, and a finder window on a scratch directory.

To the right are my work windows.

Window snapping makes that impossible, about the only thing you can do is pretend you're using a tiling WM and cmd-tab any time you need to see anything, or waste an inflexible chunk of screen on it.

Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more

#74

Post by andai »

thedirt0115 wrote: post #43
kstrauser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The #3 productivity app on the Mac App Store is a $2 app that enables this on Apples: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12

Hammerspoon can do this (and way more!) for free :) https://www.hammerspoon.org/go/#winresize

I ended up with Hammerspoon when looking for an AutoHotKey alternative. Highly recommend.

Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more

#75

Post by nathanyukai »

cdelsolar wrote: post #56

He's wrong. I can barely fit 80 characters on each panel when I split my code window into two on my Macbook Pro. Any more and I wouldn't be able to see the whole line, or would have to grow eyes that can see tiny fonts.

He's not wrong, he just doesn't care for your use case. Get a monitor or don't have two terminals side by side.

Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more

#76

Post by ccmcarey »

saagarjha wrote: post #20
briandilley wrote: post #14

I wonder how Linus feels about tabs vs. spaces (I didn't read the entire post, so maybe he addressed it?)

The kernel uses 8-space tabs.

How do you mean 8 space tabs? Are tabs not single characters \t?

Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more

#77

Post by ordu »

vjeux wrote: post #52

It's ironic that he's wrapping the text of this email at 80 columns rather than letting the email reader do the wrapping based on the width.

Text and source code in a programming language are different things. Most lines in source code do not fill line from start to end. And there are a lot of almost empty lines (in terms of count of non-space characters). It is easy to navigate through this by eyes. But when you got a rectangle filled with characters it is much easier to get lost.

Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more

#79

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

winrid wrote: post #19
krferriter wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of terminals just set that as the default window width. No real reason for it, I usually snap to half the screen width immediately anyways. That turns out to about 105-120 characters width. Some people might just not resize it most of the time. Especially on Mac where efficient window management just isn't a thing.

A note on your last sentence. Once I used my Win10 laptop at an interview at Apple. The interviewer saw me drag one window the the side, snap it, and then select another window to fill in the space. He said, wow, Windows is really nice! :)

Have you seen Powertoys[0] FancyZones? It’s honestly in my top 5 Windows 10 apps of all time and it’s free. Fully customisable window zone manager allowing different zone layouts on each monitor and with hot key support.

This should be standard in Windows IMO. It has absolutely transformed how I work and noticeably increased my productivity.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

Re: But no, 80-column terminals in 2020 isn't “reasonable” any more

#80

Post by KODeKarnage »

js2 wrote: post #49

The problem with overly wide lines is that it hurts readability because it's harder to find the next line when scanning your eyes from right back to left. Take it from the world of books: This study may be helpful: > This study examined the effects of line length on reading performance. Reading rates were found to be fastest at 95 cpl. Readers reported either liking or disliking the extreme line lengths (35 cpl, 95 c…

One line, one idea. That's the goal. Your eye doesn't need to move if you can get the information you need from the first 30 characters. Two lines, one idea. That's a recipe for cognitive disaster. It forces you to read the entirety of the preceding line to understand what is happening on the next one. As a good example, reading logs. You can scan down the log to find what you want. Imagine if the time was placed at the end of the line. It doesn't matter how many characters on a line in that case, the reading the log is a massive cognitive load.
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