Jayne80 character column limits in code are a legacy from 80 column text displays which are a legacy of IBM's 80 column punch cards which are a legacy of Roman chariots which had two side-by-side 40 column horses
ok maybe that last bit is a bit silly but it's no sillier than using a nearly 100 year old punch card standard on today's wide screen monitors
ctrl the gender goblin@dotjayne idk it fits neatly, I can have my terminal emulator, and some browser opened side to side, and I can read the code easily without having to scroll laterally
Ian Douglas Scott@ctrl @dotjayne Yeah, 80 characters can be pretty good for fitting on half the screen... for some screen sizes and fonts.
Really it might make more sense to automatically reflow for viewing. In some ways its quite odd that `man` will happily reflow formatted text for the size of terminal I'm using, but for source code we expect a certain width baked into the file.
Text files formatted for a specific width are pretty archaic and uncommon at this point.