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Re: Man-width on terminals
From: |
Juri Linkov |
Subject: |
Re: Man-width on terminals |
Date: |
Fri, 09 Nov 2007 02:54:14 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.0.50 (gnu/linux) |
> With more inter-line whitespace, you can have longer lines. The
> maximum reasonable length for the contents of a line with lots of
> inter-line whitespace turned out to be about 70 characters. Computer
> terminals have the whitespace needed, so they are seldom narrow. And,
> for the same reason, terminals seldom had more than 80 characters.
> (That is also why cards on which FORTRAN was written had only 80
> characters.)
>
> Of course, if you wish to make your manual page width be less than 70
> characters, that is fine. I am against long lines that need more
> inter-line whitespace than many writers provide.
As an xterm can have arbitrary width, users are free to resize it to the
comfortable width. And I think Man should fill the text to a width
preferred by the user (there is a special option `Man-width').
--
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/