[crazygringo]

No it's not, it's perfect.

You want to be able to do side-by-side diffs on your laptop using a normal sized (not tiny) font.

You want to be able to paste snippets into design documents and emails and blogs without accidental wrapping or truncating or scrolling.

80 is nicely legible. It works really well.

[conductr]

Actually no I don’t want to be able to work like that on a laptop monitor. I’d rather optimize my full screen real estate. There in lies the conflict.

[crazygringo]

Since in most cases, most lines don't even reach 80 characters, or they're long enough to still wrap at 120, there's not a lot of optimization going on.

Going from 80 to 120 will net you, what -- an extra 2 or 4 lines in your viewport?

It's not worth the optimization when you lose so much for the reasons I described.

[conductr]

If I wanted extra lines, I'd probably use my monitors in tall mode. I mainly just don't want to think about line wrapping at all, that's the optimization for me.

I also tend to work on a single file at a time versus trying to view multiple files side by side. But when I do want to do that, I'm not trying to work on a laptop monitor, so I have 2 monitors for that use case.

The white space I have available but typically don't use, simply doesn't bother me. I like some white space, I'm not seeking out density as some productivity hack, I can tab to another file when I want to see it, seeing them both at same time isn't a huge requirement of mine.

It sounds like you have a job that has you frequently doing code jams on a tiny monitor (why? you got pulled into someone's office? you coding on a train?) so this works for your normal situations. You're not understanding that I avoid those situations. I code from a desk with a full setup or I don't code, I take notes about what changes need to be done when I get back to coding.

[thayne]

On my laptop, with a normal font (12-14pt) I can have a side bu side diff of 100 char wide text just fine.