[d_]

I just checked. I have a 17 inch laptop screen (uncommon and has to be sought for these days). To hit 120 characters on two terminals side-by-side requires 9pt font. That's definitely not something everyone can manage.

I think 120 might even be pushing the limits of conscientiousness.

[crystalnewb]

I was speaking of lines of code in a full screen text editor, I'm sure there are many programs that when displayed side by side on a small screen 120 chars would be too many. But let's avoid the strawman here. So 2 terminals side by side 120 chars each, you tried to display 240 per line in actuality? Do i have it right?

[jkaplowitz]

Not a straw man - on a laptop away from readily available external monitors, it's quite common to want to see two things at once while doing work. We're discussing the line length policy for a single line of source code in a single file, not the number of characters that can visibly fit side by side on a screen.

There's definitely a bit more flexibility - not infinite - when you only consider the full-scale case. But one is often less productive with that as the only viable option, or else one has external monitors in which case in that usage pattern the laptop is effectively a desktop.

[d_]

Small screen? Again, 17in is rather difficult to come by in a laptop.

The real fallacy is in denigrating the side-by-side workflow. Just having every window be fullscreen would be madness.