Fear Of Wide Monitors

[KarstenK]

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

Press F1 for help or google it. Greetings from Germany

[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.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt

[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.

[Dan Neely]

VS is too sidebar centric to play nice at even 1200px wide; and while I have rotated my 3" 2560x1600 screen to portrait before, it's too tall to be comfortably used that way.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt

[dandy72]

snorkie wrote:

To tackle this issue, I use word-wrap

<shudder>

snorkie wrote:

it sounds like I'm in the minority

Probably. :-)

[KLPounds]

Its an optimizing cash cow for those who get paid per line of code.:thumbsup:

[patbob]

The resolution of monitors has dropped in recent years -- there was a huge backward reset when HD TVs came out and all the manufacturers retooled for producing flat panel TVs.

We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.

[vtokar]

There exists an optimum ratio between the linewidth and the interline spacing. I do not know its exact value but it is defined by the ease of following with the eyes the line and then switching to the next one. This is why the newspapers are printed in narrow columns instead of across the page.

[snorkie]

Several people have mentioned the newspaper example. Its interesting, but code isn't a newspaper article. Rarely do I have several long lines in a row that require wrapping. Most code I see has tons of white space around lines of code for formatting/readability. Hogan

[RASPeter]

At my company our coding standard strongly discourages formatting code that way. We frequently deal with XAML and Win32, so that means we sometimes have really long lines, but that's just how it goes. It's really rare that anyone needs to actually see the entire line at once. Normally there are just a few items that actually matter, so we try to put those near the beginning of the line when possible (things like Name and Grid.Row/Column in XAML, for example). Generally, we find it much more useful to be able to get a sense of the structure of the code at a glance, and that gets broken when function calls are split into multiple lines. There are some rare cases where it makes sense to do that, of course, but that's stuff like building an xml file using stringstream.

[rtpHarry]

I guess the new limit is that it can fit on a GitHub page :)

[Lost User]

I gave up Visual Studio this year for vi. 80 column lines means I can get six terminal windows open on my 30" monitor and never need to scroll horizontally

[jschell]

MKJCP wrote:

I believe the point was if you can comprehend many characters per line in other media, why not in code

As in the written word? One difference is that a spelling error or a syntax error is unlikely to make a sentence unreadable. And certainly will not make the book self destruct. That of course isn't true for code. That difference would seem like a substantial one.

MKJCP wrote:

Paperback was a bad example but much written text has 100+ characters per line

Examples please. Fiction books do not. Non-fiction including text books do not. Magazines do not.