[OT] Terminal width

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Benjamin Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> writes:
>
> 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?
[...]
>   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, there's an alternative to wide-screen monitors allowing for
wider windows: wide-screen monitors allowing for *more numerous*
80-column windows. :)

Maybe it's analogous to the way that newspaper-texts are laid-out
in side-by-side columns.

The bit about `more information fitting into the field of view at once'
is interesting, because `the field of view' isn't necessarily as wide
as people think it is: small text, for example is basically unreadable
outside of the foveal region; effective use of more peripheral vision,
then, involves using it to track *different* (more gross) types of
information from what the fovea handles.

Consider the implications of that, and it seems that maybe I'm actually
not joking with the "*more numerous* 80-column windows" comment, above.

-- 
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