On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 04:16:44PM +0000, Tony's unattended mail wrote: > On 2012-11-20, Chris Bannister <cbannis...@slingshot.co.nz> wrote: > > > > Ouch! Could you please set the "line wrap" value in your editor to a > > sane value? 72 characters seems to be the recommended setting. > > That was the recommendation in the 90s. > > These days, any decent news reader has word wrap. Considering the > variety of wide displays, it's no longer reasonable to impose a fixed > text width on an author.
[ Replying only to the list, no point in sending to an unattended email ;-) ] If someone, particularly on a support list, sends an atrociously long line, then it becomes *much* harder to select the appropriate part of that line/paragraph/epistle and delete the rest of it when replying. Also, most of us don't use news readers! My own 'xterms' are usually 100 characters wide, my ttys are often 128 wide (but only 85 on the netbook - need a bigger font to read it comfortably!). But "wasting" space by keeping the line length short isn't a problem, it actually makes it easier to read the text. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce
