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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

If you haven’t already heard the counter argument, then it’s less about screen width and more about being able to view multiple pieces of code side by side (split window editing, and side by side diffs for code review.)

It’s also important to accommodate people wanting to do this with large type sizes, which becomes important as eyesight deteriorates.

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All the editors I use have supported soft wrapping, so line length isn’t such an issue. For me it’s mostly about being able to grow each line of code without frying my brain like Perl’s leaning toothpick syndrome does.

I hate soft wrapping. It makes the code much harder to read and reason about. Especially if someone else wrote it.

I rather choose to scroll to the right to see long lines when needed.

I find wrapped code much harder to read, unless it's indented properly. The wrapping breaks the flow.

(Extremely late edit: “grok” not “grow”)

On most monitors today you can still have 120 characters and see 3 or 4 side by side tracks including the filesystem in another track.

How big is "modern" these days? I have a multiple 22" 1920x1080 screens instead of one huge one, and after making the font as small as is still comfortable at my viewing distance I get 202 visible columns in maximized VS Code. At a still-workable but small enough size that I'll start unconsciously hunching at my desk I can get up to 271. Common laptop screen sizes are even more constrained.

I also like to have one monitor turned to 1080x1920 for text editing and consoles. I'd never try to do a side-by-side diff on it, but it really makes you see just how many GUIs are downright wasteful of horizontal space.

2? sure. 3 or 4? Either you're using a monitor that's far outside the realm of "most" or your font size is set to a value far below the mean.

In my experience the majority have 27 inches monitors.

I have 3 of those at my desk, 2 vertical and one horizontal. it's a popular system from what I can see.

Oh... you mean 3 or 4 across two or more monitors? That makes a bit more sense, but I find it an odd way to compare things. Obviously if you have n monitors you can fit at least n windows "side by side".

(Also disagree about most people having 27" monitors, but I don't think that makes much of a difference)

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