Re: Carbon emacs - frame too big for minibuffer can't resize window

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> Note that lines longer than 80 characters are not recommended as they
> will not fit on standard terminals. That's why the default width is 80.

The problem is not "standard terminals" but legibility.

The rule of thumb is usually that upto 60 columns is perfectly fine, but as
you go further away from that (soft) limit, the eyes have a harder and harder
time to find the beginning of a line from the end of the previous one.

Given that code (as opposed to plain text) often has some indentation on the
left side, 80 columns is still OK (assuming 20 of them are indentation
whitespace).

For this reason I'd indeed recommend to stick to 80 columns for typical
situations (even though barely anybody still knows what's a "standard
terminal").  Of course, when working on something like a spreadsheet, there
are often other reasons to justify using 250 columns or more.


        Stefan