Hello,
(Yes, there are more discussions on the development list this week
than normal ... sorry about that.)
At the risk of starting a bikeshed: do we think it is time to raise
the 80 columns limit somewhat?
As I understand it, there were (or are) two reasons for this limit.
One is that more columns simply did not fit on the monitors or layouts
developers were using back in the days this limit was instituted.
Hopefully this reason is now no longer valid, for 80 columns at least.
The other is that reading very wide unwrapped code is not really
pleasant, moving one's eyes back and forth over a wide area quickly
gets tiring. This of course is still very much a concern. (I
personally keep my web browser much narrower than my screen's true
width for precisely this reason, and the same for IDEs. Actually I
cannot remember the last time I maximized a window that was not a
video player...)
In my experience, 120 columns is still low enough that it does not
cause eye strain, and should continue to fit comfortably at 12pt font
size on 1366x768 screens, which is probably the smallest most
developers are using anymore; while the 50% larger number of columns
vs. 80 makes a considerable difference in how many lines have to be
wrapped, especially in a project like Haiku where we often have
verbose class names (which I do like!).
-waddlesplash
