[OT] Terminal width (was: OpenOffice question)

[Jerry Feldman]

On 03/29/2010 09:34 PM, Benjamin Scott wrote:
> 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.
>
>
>   
I regularly use wide screen widths in Emacs, but I generally try to keep
my lines of code and comments to the old Hollerith standard as I first
learned to program using punched cards.  Virtually every email program I
have used over the past few years allows me to type using the full
screen width, but RFC 2822 advises that line widths should not exceed 78
characters, but allows lines up to 998 characters. Fortunately (or
unfortunately depending on perspective) most email programs are
essentially word processors.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 253 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/private/gnhlug-discuss/attachments/20100330/2e413d1c/attachment.bin