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Comment by shockinglytrue | Hacker News Reader

Typical ill-considered comment from Linus, and surprising for someone getting on his years. Column width is an accessibility issue.

I'm barely in my mid 30s and the average font size has been steadily creeping, maybe 1.5 pts per 5 years.

I could tolerate 132 column files today, but by the time I'm 50 there is no way this will work, regardless of screen size

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Buy a bigger monitor. Or get glasses. I'm 38, rocking a 43" 4k monitor. There's so much room. Scale things up or down to your comfort level. It's a pleasure if you use an editor like atom.

I generally agree. My allergies really mess with my near vision, which is otherwise very good. My needs change. Should everyone else have to change how they do things to meet my changing needs? We have the technology to make any line length equally accessible to everyone.

We should be focusing instead on the contextual and cognitive pros and cons of various line lengths.

> I'm 38, rocking a 43" 4k monitor. There's so much room.

There's no more room on a 43" 3840 x 2160 monitor than there is on a 32" 3840 x 2160...

That's fine. The point is that the font size is no issue at 43". Could be really small, you'd still be able to see it well.

Yes it is if you physical ability to resolve pixels (eyesight) are less than the DPI of the smaller monitor, which I take to be what was what the top poster shockinglytrue meant by his age related character point size increase.

Is it a TV? If so does it work well for small text and are there any negatives vs a monitor?

There are 43/42.5" monitors that aren't too expensive, but if you want much bigger you will have to go TV, which can work okay as long as they support a reasonable colorspace encoding that enables quick enough color changes between pixels. Unless the TV supports RGB, you'll want to make sure it supports YUV/chroma 4:4:4.

The refresh rate might be slower, so of you get annoyed by a 30Hz refresh rate, you'll want to make sure the TV does 60Hz.

Nowadays I'm guessing anything but the cheapest models can do it for any given resolution, but some diligence is probably in order as TV specs are not as uniform and reliable as monitor specs.

What kind of laptop bag do you use for the monitor?

Well Linus is 50 years old. So I expect he also suffers from age related vision problems. So I don't think he is unaware of it being more difficult to read text as you get older.

I'm 62 and don't normally wear glasses, but reading glasses have become a big part of my life. I use 1.0 to look at my big screen, 1.75 to look at my phone and always misplace them somewhere.

Head to Costco and buy three three packs of the diopter strength you loose. It'll take a few years to loose 9 pairs and if you bust them out of the pack when a pair is lost then you always have a scratch free pair.

As "nerdy" as they look, the CliC brand readers (that separate magnetically at the nose, and that wrap around the back of your head with a solid band) are remarkably good at sticking with you as you move around in the day. 1.0's at the computer, 1.x around your neck.

Sadly, they don't make them with anything under 1.25.

> "the average font size has been steadily creeping, maybe 1.5 pts per 5 years."

To be fair, so has the monitor resolution and its density. I'm looking at HN, and imagine, ten years ago, I was using 1280x1024 then, this very font would've physically been a much bigger picture. So in effect, the font-size increase may only counter-measuring the resolution increase...

> the monitor resolution and its density

On most operating systems, this is supposed to be almost irrelevant since they use a "virtual" resolution and DPI that gets used to render apps at a reasonable size across displays.

Do you need reading glasses? I found I did (I'm 47) and it made a massive difference in looking at code- I can use a smaller font and experience much less eye strain.

I've also been buying a larger monitor every few years, as the prices drop.

But I hated the 42" 4K I tried and returned it. The problem was the edges are just too far away. If I use them I end up with the same kind of neck strain I would get with a multi-monitor setup. So I only used kind of the middle section of the screen anyway. And at 42" 4K the physical pixels are just too big - everything is fuzzy.

32" 4K is the sweet spot for me. Maybe when there's a reasonably priced 42" 8K curved display I'll give it a go.

Do you know if your neck strain is due to horizontal or vertical movements? On a few times I had to work with big monitors (>30"), I noticed that I placed/sized windows only at the center, and not all the way to the top. Looking up too much is not comfortable for my neck. For the horizontal movement, I have no problem. But when my eyes are focused on the centre part, if I need to look at the extreme left/right, I need to refocus, which is slow/tiring.

My work setup is 2x24" monitors, and I really prefer 2 small ones instead of a bigger one. I can orient them so that all pixels are approximately at the same distance to my eyes.

The vertical was definitely more uncomfortable than horizontal.

Yes this. I have 20/20 vision but as I got older getting some mild reading glasses dramatically improved my development experience.

Well, Linus has already said he doesn’t care about your (or anybody else’s) accessibility issues.

Is the kernel getting impossible to compile on anything less than a monster $2500 gaming rig? Too bad. Stop being poor or from a poor country.

Does the code require a $1000 monitor to be readable? Same.

Do you need a larger size font because of age? Well pop your Benjamin Button polls coz Linus Torvalds dont care.

> I'm barely in my mid 30s and the average font size has been steadily creeping, maybe 1.5 pts per 5 years

I'm a similar age, and my font size has been decreasing steadily. As monitors get better pixel density, text is readable at smaller size. The ereader app I use on my 5.6" phone screen shows 38 lines of text (and approx 45 characters wide) plus blank margins.

Can't you enable line wrapping in your editor?

Line wrapping is an abomination.

Visual line wrapping (that doesn't modify the code) is just fine. Works a treat for prose and notes, and if you combine it with a toggle to switch to horizontally scrolling lines, it works remarkably well.

Horizontal scrolling (a.k.a. side scrolling) then?

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