[OT] Terminal width (was: OpenOffice question)

[Benjamin Scott]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 8:34 PM, Ric Werme <ewerme at comcast.net> wrote:
> ... I find myself sticking to emacs and its "fill paragraph"
> function and 80 column lines.  It's amazing how much influence IBM cards
> still have on me and other right-thinking individuals.

  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?

  Best I could come up with was "if Microsoft decides to change the
default width of their 'console windows', that will be the new
standard".  Hey, it's about the same logic as an 80 column punched
card.

  Why would the width change?

  With 16:10 displays becoming the norm, there's a lot of horizontal
real estate going to waste.

  You can rotate to 10:16, of course.  That's not without issues,
though.  It's non-standard.  Many won't even know it's possible;
others won't bother; others will try but won't want to deal with
compatibility headaches from crap GUI software that assumes 16:10.

  And even at 10:16, with a modern high-res, high-DPI display, there's
still likely to be wasted horizontal space.

  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.

  Perhaps one way to approach this would be for an IDE that can
intelligently word-wrap code for display, keeping indent levels
aligned, etc.

  "These are the kind of things I think about when I'm home alone and
the power is out." (George Carlin)

-- Ben