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by Ensorceled 4905 days ago
I find it ironic that the author says:

  Why, in the name of all that is holy, do our modern style
  guides still force us to manually wrap text to fit within
  80 columns? (That’s four and a half vertical splits of 80
  columns each on my monitor!)
but chooses a blog template that holds the width constant at 1000px. Perhaps there is a reason not to grow without bound horizontally?

I use 80 characters because it's just easier to read than 120 char lines. Plus, I rarely need to break lines anyway, even at 80 chars ... what the heck are you writing that needs to be 120 chars wide?

Also, I have 2 screens with 4 work areas (each half a screen):

* mvim (at 90 chars wide)

* two terminals

* browser

* developer tools

At 120 chars lines, mvim now needs to be 125/130 chars wide and require it's own dedicated monitor.

2 comments

>what the heck are you writing that needs to be 120 chars wide?

Ever used java?

private static final Map<Class<? extends Persistent>, PersistentHelper> class2helper = new HashMap<Class<? extends Persistent>, PersistentHelper>();

if ((string1.toLowerCase().equals(Localization.getString('Yes')) || string1.toLowerCase().equals('yes')) && Cleaning.Verifier.isSafeInput(string2) && Cleaning.Verifier.isSafeInput(string3))

The first one I found on google, the second one is based on something one would normally expect to find in an average java codebase.

True with Java/ObjC you get very view verbs/nouns in the same "sentence" length.

But ObjC and Java developers also have the habit of writing long undebuggable sentences like:

response = object.veryLongMethodName(object2,object3).anotherLongMethodName().yetAnotherLongMethodName(object4)

The design of the blog is not under my control; if it was, it'd be a lot more flexible. (Responsive design FTW.)

The lines that are 81 characters long benefit greatly from the increase to 120 characters. That was the primary reason for increasing the limit beyond PEP-8's default 80 in my FOSS codebases. There were far too many lines whose wrapping was clearly stupid, and too much developer time spent worrying about it.

I have 4 screens (2@1024x768, 1@2560x1440, 1@1280x800) and frequently utilize multi-column splits. I only turn soft-wrapping on when I need it, which is almost never. If I were utilizing your setup I wouldn't enable it on your mvim display; <2% of the lines in any of the codebases I work on exceed 90 characters.