Re: Changing line widths in the Emacs source code

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Lars.

On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 15:45:57 +0200, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Now for the most controversial suggestion of all: Make the Emacs code
> wider!

> Emacs has tried to keep the line width of the source code at 80
> characters since Emacs was created.  It was a good choice (perhaps the
> only) back then, ....

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.

> .... but most screens are wide and short these days, and the
> folding contortions we have to do to make everything fit in 80
> characters is sometimes annoying, and leads to code that's awkward to
> read.

Code that is awkward to fit into 80 columns would perhaps do better with
some refactoring.  But even some of the CC Mode functions which are far
too long in terms of number of lines (e.g. c-forward-decl-or-cast-1,
c-guess-basic-syntax) don't have terrible trouble in 80 columns.

> So my suggestion is: Change the default to 100.

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.

Were the gentlemen's agreement that buffers are max. 80 chars wide to be
rescinded, Follow mode and other arrangements of side-by-side windows
would become that much less useful.

> (This, of course, doesn't mean that we change any of the existing code,
> but we stop formatting all new code to fit within 80 columns, and
> instead aim for 100 instead.)

I am against this.

> -- 
> (domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
>    bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).