From: Vladimir Sedach <vas@oneofus.la>
To: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Changing line widths in the Emacs source code
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2020 11:38:40 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87d02pmsi7.fsf@t510.orion.oneofus.la> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20200913142210.GA4285@ACM>
Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:
> It remains a good choice, now. Wide text is more difficult to read.
> For that reason, newspaper columns (remember them?) were typically much
> less than 80 columns wide.
The optimum line length for legibility has been found to be 55-60
characters over hundreds of years of book publishing experience. 90
characters per line is considered the absolute maximum, and you
rarely see it. "Today's wide screens" is as bad of a reason for
increasing line length in text files as "today's wide paper" would be
an excuse to increase line length in books.
> My Linux TTY screen is 240 characters wide and 67 lines high. With that
> I can get Follow Mode three windows wide, giving me a total display of
> 195 contiguous lines of a single buffer. There are only occasional
> lines which need to be wrapped. This is very helpful, particularly
> whilst debugging.
I did a lot of testing in 2017, and found that even the lowest
resolution 16:9 laptop displays could show 3 columns of 70 character
wide text side-by-side, which works really well with Emacs and
particularly with EXWM.
I switched from 120 character line width for code to 70 columns
everywhere. The main motivation was that this allows more information
to be displayed on the screen, and easier buffer/EXWM window
navigation. What I found is that this actually improved code
legibility, and had the unexpected side-effect of making it easier to
include code in e-mails, documentation, and blog posts, improving
communication.
If anything, consider formatting your code to less than 80 characters
per line.
--
Vladimir Sedach
Software engineering services in Los Angeles https://oneofus.la
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-09-13 18:38 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 45+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-09-13 13:45 Changing line widths in the Emacs source code Lars Ingebrigtsen
2020-09-13 13:58 ` Stefan Kangas
2020-09-13 14:09 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2020-09-13 15:53 ` Stefan Kangas
2020-09-13 16:21 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2020-09-13 16:51 ` Yuan Fu
2020-09-13 16:58 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2020-09-13 17:55 ` Stephen Leake
2020-09-13 18:04 ` arthur miller
2020-09-13 17:34 ` Eric Abrahamsen
2020-09-13 17:54 ` Stephen Leake
2020-09-13 14:22 ` Alan Mackenzie
2020-09-13 18:38 ` Vladimir Sedach [this message]
2020-09-13 20:13 ` Göktuğ Kayaalp
2020-09-13 20:52 ` Stefan Monnier
2020-09-13 21:23 ` Göktuğ Kayaalp
2020-09-14 0:08 ` Tim Cross
2020-09-13 23:45 ` Óscar Fuentes
2020-09-14 2:23 ` Stefan Monnier
2020-09-14 2:28 ` T.V Raman
2020-09-14 7:42 ` tomas
2020-09-14 9:59 ` Alan Third
2020-09-15 7:25 ` Stefan Kangas
2020-09-13 14:53 ` Daniel Martín
2020-09-13 15:01 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2020-09-13 17:23 ` Andy Moreton
2020-09-13 17:29 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2020-09-13 18:07 ` Göktuğ Kayaalp
2020-09-13 15:09 ` Stefan Kangas
2020-09-13 14:54 ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-09-13 14:57 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2020-09-13 15:13 ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-09-13 17:15 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2020-09-13 15:27 ` Stefan Monnier
2020-09-13 17:31 ` Dmitry Gutov
2020-09-13 17:34 ` Andrea Corallo via Emacs development discussions.
2020-09-16 6:42 ` jeremyb
2020-09-13 15:28 ` Göktuğ Kayaalp
2020-09-13 15:43 ` Óscar Fuentes
2020-09-13 17:07 ` Amin Bandali
2020-09-13 18:01 ` Stephen Leake
2020-09-13 18:17 ` Göktuğ Kayaalp
2020-09-14 3:50 ` Richard Stallman
2020-09-14 19:25 ` David Koppelman
2020-09-15 8:53 ` Lars Brinkhoff
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