Fear Of Wide Monitors

[PIEBALDconsult]

I can only fit 112 characters across a sheet of (letter size) paper, so that's what I limit my lines to in whatever editor I'm using. It uses less than half the width of my screen, but at least that makes looking at diffs easier. :shrug:

[Ron Nicholson]

Isn't that where we came from? Oh wait, I think it was 3 characters per line in machine code. IIRC :confused:

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[Lost User]

On my old computer the programs ask for the line width (of the attached terminal) at the start. If you just hit return, you will get one character per line.

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[jschell]

snorkie wrote:

The more source code I look at, the shorter the lines seem to get

My wide monitor is wide enough that if I have two source files open side by side then I can see both. If the lines are short enough. If I see source code where most lines require a wide monitor to see them (or to scroll) I would expect that the source code has a problem.

snorkie wrote:

How do those developers deal with paperback books?

The random paperback book that I just picked up an counted one line had 54 characters. Rather certain that I have never read a paperback that had, say, 120 characters in a line. So not sure where your comment is going.

[dandy72]

Last time I printed from VS, the default seemed to be 120 characters per line, so I tend to stick with that. Which also just so happens to fit quite nicely on a portrait-mode monitor (1920x1200) (1200x1920), plus one window docked vertically. I have two such monitors side-by-side, with VS stretched across both, plus a third one (1920x1080) set up in the standard landscape mode for everything else.

[snorkie]

My comment about books is related to word-wrap. Most developers I work with can't seem to code with word-wrap turned on. It seems as simple as reading a book. Since I read a fair amount, I have no issue coding with word wrap turned on, it just feels natural. Hogan

[PIEBALDconsult]

dandy72 wrote:

printed from VS

I don't do that; I use Word.

[snorkie]

I can't remember the last time I printed anything! It isn't a consideration for anything I work on. Hogan

[dandy72]

I wasn't implying I print a lot of code. Given the number of monitor sizes/resolutions, I decided I had to settle on *something*, so a printed sheet of paper seemed to make sense to me at a time. Having to scroll code horizontally, just because I happen to occasionally be on a smaller display, is a tremendous hassle (I know, first-world problem)...so even the crappiest display I might be stuck using will probably be wide enough to show at least one file without scrolling.

[snorkie]

Fair enough. To tackle this issue, I use word-wrap. I essentially have the same environment on any monitor without having to perform any special formatting. I find the extra wrapping of code harder to read, but it sounds like I'm in the minority. Hogan

[KarstenK]

Some monitors can be turned 90 degrees, so you can see a lot of lines, after changing the display mode :rolleyes:

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[markus_code]

My "coding monitor" is rotated 90°. With short lines (my Vim configuration breaks them at 80 characters) I can still have 2 files in a vertical split and see their full horizontal contents. It works very well if you also use a terminal (I use tmux) that allows splits, since you can have a small window at the bottom for builds, or htop, or both :)

[Kiriander]

I love wide monitors, but I don't use the width for code. Instead, I use half the width for code and the other half for let's say documentation. Or the dubugee. Or something else.

[SortaCore]

They worked out you can read faster with one word displayed at a time. So why not apply that to code too? Go through hundreds of lines in a few minutes and hope your instincts are attentive enough.

[User 10437904]

The human eye gets tired easily when being forced to scan across wide spans of text. That's why newspaper and magazine articles are split into columns.

[MKJCP]

I believe the point was if you can comprehend many characters per line in other media, why not in code. Paperback was a bad example but much written text has 100+ characters per line. Put another way, inability to read long code lines does not seem like the cause of short code lines.

[snorkie]

Maybe I'm not human... :-\ Hogan

[snorkie]

Thanks for the link, that was cool! I was surprised I could easily do the 700 WPM. Though that might be a bit more difficult with code. Was that one { or three? Hogan

[Dan Neely]

Too lazy to find them now; but that's been thoroughly trashed (from the good idea standpoint) by experts in reading/comprehension in that what it mostly does is prevent you from doing all the extra processing needed to correctly understand non-trivial sentence structure or anything that requires thought.

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[Ygnaiih]

I actually have and like a wide monitor. I do break up a line when something in that line is more readable in a second line. I do this often in SQL like: … From tblMain m Left join tblPoop p On m.thing = p. thing. That helps to tame the dyslexia for me.