Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

> Similarly, if you really try to use that screen real estate to its fullest for coding, and start editing 200-300 character lines, you’ll quickly notice it starts to feel just a bit weird and confusing. It gets surprisingly easy to lose your place. Rhetorically the “80 characters is just because of dinosaur technology! Use all those ultrawide pixels!” talking point is quite popular, but practically people usually just want a few more characters worth of breathing room, maxing out at 100 characters, far narrower than even the most svelte widescreen.

Well yeah, this seems to be a bit of a straw man. Nobody is suggesting 200 characters. But 80 is definitely anaemic. I think 100 is quite low too, so it seems bold to say "maxing out at 100".

120 is the most comfortable I've found, striking a good balance between readability, excessive wrapping, and side-by-side viewing.

I've been writing code (and prose) with 3 vertical rulers for almost 10 years now: 66, 80 and 120 characters each. None of them are hard limits for me. But they do help guide my eye.

Most lines fit under 66. A lot more than 50%, even code written by other people. I'd say most lines also fit under 80, and very rarely do lines actually cross 120.

I agree hard limits aren't usually a good idea. Especially because they complicate auto-formatting (the Prettier algorithm which is clearly the best doesn't support them). Also sometimes you want to paste a long URL and that's a pain with hard limits.

I personally find anything over 100 is annoying, 120 is definitely in the more frustrating range for me. I'd much rather a soft limit of < 75 and a hard limit of < 90.

I wonder what it is that makes different people choose different limits.

Ah, a man of culture, I see. :) I too settled on 120 characters a few years ago and so far I'm still happy with it. Programming is much more verbose than it was 20 years ago, and accordingly, there's plenty to be said for allowing wider lines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com