[OT] Terminal width (was: OpenOffice question)

[Ted Roche]

On 03/29/2010 09:34 PM, Benjamin Scott wrote:
> I was thinking the other day about that. I was wondering if/when
> the community-at-large reach a point where something wider than 80
> columns becomes the standard.  And if so, what will it be, or what
> will define it?  

It's difficult for the human eye to track across a long line of text and
successfully execute a carriage-return-line-feed eyeball sequence
without losing track of the line they're on. That's one of the reasons
that magazines often split their layout into multiple columns on a page.

Using the "vga=ask" option on my Fedora 11 kernel gives me a kazillion
options. The "VGA" options all list 80 columns by some number of lines,
so is the VGA "standard" [1] locked to 80 columns? Reading wikipedia, it
talks about the VGA text resolutions, all 80 column or less, but the
SuperVGA articles doesn't talk about it at all. Supposedly VESA
standardized some of the Super/Ultra VGA options, but I don't see any
such options offered. Selecting the highest (1680 x 1050 using nv on a
ThinkPad T61) gives me text consoles of 210 wide and 65 lines; beautiful
if I need a high-density information display, but unreadable for
long-term work.

The Python Style Guide states "Limit all lines to a maximum of 79
characters." (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/)

I remember programming a DOS-based database application to have a
"hi-resolution" mode of 132x43 which was possible on the (PS/2?)
hardware of the time. I'm guessing that's a different "standard."

I prefer to split the horizontal space across a couple of windows for
best comprehension. Jeff Atwood suggests three monitors is the new cool:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/three-monitors-for-every-user.html

[1] I love standards, that's why I have so many!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vector_Video_Standards2.svg, also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Video_Graphics_Array
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_display_standard
>   Why does this matter?  It's commonly claimed that human
> understanding significantly increases when the information is fit in
> to the field-of-view at one time.  That has been my experience, both
> personally, and with others.  As one CS instructor put it
> (paraphrase), "Yes, this means you'll be a better programmer if you
> get a bigger monitor."  So if "everyone" has a wide screen, but
> "nobody" uses it, there's actually reason to suspect that might be
> decreasing code quality.
>   

Well, a typical windowed application development environment might have
an editor window or six, a debug output window, a browser window, a
FireBug Window, a database browser,... and fits nicely on a couple 19"
LCD panels, side-by-side. Not all within the field-of-view
simultaneously, I suspect, but like a baseball game, easy enough to
follow the action from one to the other.


-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com