Hello Ian and Mario.
We have retina screens, GPU accelerated rendering and magical auto-completion.
Who's "we"? 1 and 2 are constrained by money. 1 and 3 are also constrained by personal preference.
I need a _big_ screen because I also do photo processing beside coding, and I can't afford 2 screens, one big and another high density.
Command shell is a very old and peculiar human interface — if human at all. They had 80 character wide screens and visibly lagging connexion. We have retina screens, GPU accelerated rendering and magical auto-completion.
You might have that. I, as a blind braille display user, have one line of at most 80 characters. When I am traveling, I typically only have 40 characters. Given these constraints, I still consider a command line interface superior to any sort of buttonized nonesense. But thats just me, apparently.
This is not how I expected my message to be understood. I did not mean to imply that every Haskell programmer has or should have a retina screen and a high performance GPU — only that, as a profession, we have way better tools now than back then. In humanities, it is usual for there to be either a normal distribution or a Pareto distribution in any large enough sample of data. So, unlike in precise sciences, a counter-example does not refute a proposition. What matters is that there is a trend. And there is a trend associated with larger and finer displays. It dawns on even the most _«old school»_ people by now. See for example a letter on Linux Kernel Mailing List.[1]
When I tile my terminal windows on my display, I can have 6 terminals visible at one time, and that's because I have them three wide. And I could still fit 80% of a fourth one side-by-side.
And guess what? That's with my default "100x50" terminal window (go to your gnome terminal settings, you'll find that the 80x25 thing is just an initial default that you can change), not with some 80x25 one. And that's with a font that has anti-aliasing and isn't some pixelated mess.
I have no specific insight about how to optimize readability for people that listen to code[2] or sense it with their hands. What I am sure of is that there are better ways to go about it than dwelling in the past. [1]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/5/29/1038 [2]: https://www.vincit.fi/fi/software-development-450-words-per-minute/