> This 80 character limit stems from a time where terminals could only display comparatively few characters in a line, a limit we haven't had in decades as screen resolutions grew.
The 80 char rule has little to do with old monitors. Has to do with ergonomics, and is why any good edited and typeset book will have between 60 and 80 characters per line.
It is a fair point, but a book is 60 - 80 characters of dense prose line after line in thick paragraphs; it is not clear how this translates to lines of code.
In my personal experience (and of couse very subjective) it helps me a lit to have lines that fit the monitor, and I can have 2 parallel windows. Using 120 chars is for me just too much. I do think the golden rule of typography is “all rules can be broken if you know what you are doing”. For me is a soft limit. If splitting a line makes the code less readable, I do allow more. But frankly, that is the case of one in maybe 50k LOC
As a part of ergonomics auditory, I really prefer 100-115 column soft limit for code editors, log viewing and console, because that’s how my single display dev setup works best. Otoh if I’m using IDEs with big sidebars like {X,VS}Code, then I need two displays and/or a full-width IDE anyway.
While I understand that this is an anecdotal preference, to me it doesn’t feel like the 80 column standard fits any modern dev workspace perfectly, tbh. (By modern I don’t mean “shiny”, just what we have now in hw/sw.)
Exactly this. Open a novel and count the characters on a line; around 80 is readable as 500 years of typographic practice has determined. Two or three levels of indentation and that bumps the page width up a bit, still less than 100.
Then let it be 80 characters from any whitespace on the left-hand side? I find it artificially awkward to have to wrap at a hard margin on the right-hand side. Surely you need to accommodate any indenting you're doing?
Take for example man pages, I find the very comfy to read. And they have generous margins on both sides.
About indenting, I try to avoid deep nesting, usually 3 is a maximum, very rare to need more, if the code has to be easy to read.
It has to do with both and that's why my comment mentions both.
But then again, of course there is a reason why terminals (or punchcards) were made that way - presumably because of reading / writing ergonomics (besides technical reasons).
The 80 char rule has little to do with old monitors. Has to do with ergonomics, and is why any good edited and typeset book will have between 60 and 80 characters per line.