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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit off topic, but what are your opinions on the validity of the 80 character width restriction? I think the 80 character limitation is increasingly rarer to actually encounter these days. Even people developing via a shell will almost certainly have much more than 80 characters of width to play with.

We've finally accepted that web developers can expect visitors to have a higher resolution than VGA, and those are potentially non-tech-savvy users. Can't we expect developers to have more than 80 character width editors? Plus, I think splitting lines is pretty ugly.

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On the other hand, I prefer not to have all of my desktop taken up by my editor. Usually, I dedicate half of it to my editor and half to a command-line. Now, 80 characters might be a bit too small, but I think it's a good goal to shoot for as long as you bear in mind that it's a guideline and not a hard rule.

I think 80 characters is getting a bit narrow, but some people like to be able to open several files (e.g. the code and the tests) in VIM or Emacs, with the buffers vertically arranged next to each other.

I used to be dead set against 80 character limits, and considered them a historical relic. But nowadays I'm actually in favour of them. On my 1440x900 screen, 80 characters allows me to have two files side by side in vim, or vim and a terminal side by side. Likewise, I'd imagine a programmer using an editor or IDE that's heavy on screen space would probably have about 80 characters of space for the file in a similar resolution.

Finally, in some cases, it's just more readable. Take the following code:

    some_list = [a_long_variable, with_contrived_names, for_an_example, insert_your, own_parallel, if_it_bothers_you]

versus

    some_list = [
        a_long_variable,
        with_contrived_names,
        for_an_example,
        insert_your,
        own_parallel,
        if_it_bothers_you
    ]

On my 5:4 aspect monitor, 80 characters is just wide enough so that I can fit two editor columns side by side at a comfortable font size without having to scroll horizontally. I suspect that if I had a widescreen monitor, I could shrink the font size slightly and see three columns of 80 characters each. But that would just be extravagant.

(Of course I have a second monitor, but that usually has documentation and a terminal and IRC on it.)

I really, really hate lines that stretch the entire width of a window - it makes it hard to find the right line on the fly-back. I've reached the end of the line, I'm looking for the start of the next line, my eyes flick back to the left side of the screen. Now, where was I?

When text stretches to take up the entire width I don't use full-screen windows. I adjust them to have about 10 words per line, and I can scan down really fast. Similarly for programming. Don't make me scroll through a 6000 line function, and don't make me read along a 6000 character line.

Yes, 6000 characters may be an exaggeration, but where is the limit? Where is the point where the line is simply "too long". Answer? It's where readability drops off, and for me, that's about 10 words, or about 60 characters.

I'm using my monitors rotated 90 degrees (i.e. portrait instead of landscape). Unfortunately, there's only 1060 pixels from left to right.

Also, the restriction to something around 80 characters stemmed from technical considerations---but it may be good for readability, too. After all 66 characters per line is the rule of thumb for type setting books. Newspapers also divide their pages into narrow columns.

The idea of restricting your width to [a number] makes sense for the tiling reasons mentioned by the other commenters.

However, since everyone is shipping widescreen monitors (which I think means UI design should stop making tall toolbars, but I digress), I find that a width of 100 characters suits my code better.

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