Re: Carbon emacs - frame too big for minibuffer can't resize window

[August]

On ons, 2005-03-02 at 08:02 -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > Note that lines longer than 80 characters are not recommended as they
> > will not fit on standard terminals. That's why the default width is 80.
> 
> The problem is not "standard terminals" but legibility.

I'm sure that legibility was one of the motivations for the decision to
use 80 character columns for terminals. The standard width sure is an
issue here as wrongly formatted paragraphs affect legibility even more
than overly long lines. The default width for editors and terminal
windows is usually 80 characters.

> The rule of thumb is usually that up to 60 columns is perfectly fine, but as
> you go further away from that (soft) limit, the eyes have a harder and harder
> time to find the beginning of a line from the end of the previous one.

(I notice that your message contains lines of length up to 77
characters.)

> Given that code (as opposed to plain text) often has some indentation on the
> left side, 80 columns is still OK (assuming 20 of them are indentation
> whitespace).
> 
> For this reason I'd indeed recommend to stick to 80 columns for typical
> situations (even though barely anybody still knows what's a "standard
> terminal").  

I guess most people have heard about the DOS prompt, terminal windows,
console mode or run-level three etc.

-- 
August