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This may be a controversial opinion, but I believe anything but 80-column line length to be a bad choice for coding. The majority of lines are not going to exceed 80 columns; but I have to pay for longer lines in screen real estate in my splits.

Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Replying to

@halvarflake

I greatly prefer using an 100 column limit. I think 80 columns has a negative impact on readability since the limit is hit far too often. 100 is a nicer balance where it's hit far less often. A smaller limit also discourages using meaningful naming which helps readability a lot.

8:37 AM · Feb 27, 2020Twitter Web App

Replying to

and

I hate reading C code using a more traditional style with tons of 1 letter variable names and lots of meaningless overly terse names. I think the 80 column limit is a huge part of that because if you actually give things reasonable names, you'll start hitting the limit too much.

Replying to

and

I have two 27" 3840x2160 monitors, each split down the middle to make 4 columns of windows. With the font and window border sizes that I prefer and line numbers enabled, there's room for ~168 columns, so screen real estate doesn't really factor into it for me, just readability.

Replying to

and

This depends to some degree on the language you're using, though with some languages it is a very real concern. Python, Java, and (with 8-col indents) C do better with 100 columns, for different reasons. Ruby, JavaScript, and (with 4-col indents) C don't need the extra columns.