On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 11:51 PM, Richard Eisenberg
At both school and at home I can fit 3 80-character buffers side by side, at a comfortable font size. Going up (even to 85 cols) would mean losing a buffer. (Or straining my eyes.) Of course I can deal with wrapped lines. But I still vote for 80 characters as a target, while allowing people wiggle room to miss this target.
The number 80 is with us for historical reasons, but I know I'm not the only one who still routinely uses 80-column buffers.
It's not just for historical reasons, it's one of those things that turned out to be a reasonable convention: Regardless of the width of windows, it's easier to read limited-width columns. I may be part of a sub-group, but just like a newspaper, I find it easier to "eye-scroll" up and down than left and right. This is the major reason why limiting column width still makes sense. Unless, of course, it's just a few lines, or things that cannot be limited due to technical reasons. I don't know if 120 is too wide, but 100 might be okay. Also, changing the length while touching a line is the most natural way to do it, as white-space reformatting patches, unless done once-only-for-everything-and-never-again, will be noise and make things like git-bisect harder to use. A width limit also is a nice way to alarm you if you start nesting too much :).