[LargeWu]

It goes farther back than terminal emulators. the old IBM punchcards physically only had room for 80 characters.

I'm with you, though. 80 characters is really short, especially if you are indented more than a few stops. It also discourages descriptive variable/method names, which harms readability of code far more than slightly longer lines.

[mjcohen]

I like to indent two characters per level of indentation. If the indentation uses braces, I indent one for the brace and one more for the code.

[salbertson]

Here's an example of how you could configure Hound to increase the line length limit.

https://gist.github.com/salbertson/d5eb2d42f68df9e18d10

[russianbandit]

80 characters is thoughtbot's style. You can always configure it to be some other number, or turn in off altogether.