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Comment by Gordonjcp | Hacker News Reader

No, because then you'd have a short line of text that takes up a huge amount of space.

Your lines of text on the screen should never be much wider than your hand at arm's length, ever, for any reason. Not even if it's an example of a one-liner in bash - wrap that line to make it easier to read.

Don't believe me? Angrily click <reply> on this post to tell me what an idiot I am, start to type your reply, and then hold your hand up palm out at arm's length to the screen so it covers up the text box you're typing in.

How big is it?

Told you so, didn't I? And it looks *perfect*.

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> Your lines of text on the screen should never be much wider than your hand at arm's length, ever, for any reason.

No thanks. Ridiculously short lines are harder to read.

Edit: I also resize the reply text box because it's almost too small to be usable.

Decades of research show that long line lengths cause people to read more slowly, although it is of course possible that you process text differently than most.

"Ridiculously" short is another matter, but by my count, "significantly wider than your hand at arm's length" means well above 20 words per line.

Research also shows that light color theme works better.

> Not even if it's an example of a one-liner in bash - wrap that line to make it easier to read.

This is the one case (that I can think of right now) where I don't agree.

As part of a larger script, sure, wrap the line so it's not way longer than all the other lines.

But a single shell command in isolation is always easier to read as a single line, if sufficient horizontal space is available.

When writing outside of a terminal, I wrap single-line shell commands with backslashes and space indentation. The breaks are at logical clauses, as if writing a conventional programming language. I find this much more readable than the alternatives. Often my terminal will also get it this way, from a copy-paste.

This also usually helps in documentation.

If I have to do it twice I stick it in a proper script, with some comments, so I remember what it all does next time I go to do it. I do this particularly for stuff like complex ffmpeg filter chains where I need to do a lot of stuff to a video file. By simply running the bash script, at some later date I can get it to remind me what it does, and suitably mangle the video file.

Then, later on, often weeks later, I use command history to scroll back through everything I've typed until I find something that looks vaguely like what I originally typed, or I don't find it and figure it all out from scratch again, having totally forgotten about the bash script I wrote.

I suspect this workflow is surprisingly common.

Yeah, but how many times do you see a one-liner that's in a nice little boxout, but there's a scrollbar and you need to slide it backwards and forwards to read the whole thing?

ever, for any reason

I have a stylebot rule for stackoverflow that makes the default container 150% wider so I can read teh codes without h-scroll.

Also, I don’t always use HN on desktop.

But when I do, that textbox is too narrow for almost every code-related post. And too short in general.

Thankfully there is a sizer handle.

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