zet

I used to wrap at 72 columns

Once upon a time I wrapped at 72. I do 90 now. This zettel is kept for historical purposes.

📺 https://youtu.be/_U5heW26fvg

Say you just want to real a YAML file with a text block and come to find out the person who wrote it had 90+ columns set for their wrapping, and has decided to punish anyone fewer than 90 columns. It’s at these times that we realize the 72 column wrap (which has been the standard for several decades and continues to be the standard for Go documentation) remains a valuable default. 72 columns leaves the standard amount of columns for line numbers and gutter in all text-based editors.

One modern reason, is for the sharing of code and content in videos such as these so people can read the screen more appropriately. We can all agree most video content uses text fonts that are woefully too small for even the youngest eyes to read.

Another option is just to not wrap at all and let the terminal window handle the wrapping for the user, no matter what the width. But purposefully choosing to arbitrarily wrap at 90 doesn’t make anyone happy. Please, just consider it.