On Fri, Sep 15, 2023 at 11:11 AM torikoshia <torikos...@oss.nttdata.com> wrote:
> I do not intend to adhere to this rule(my terminals are usually bigger > than 80 chars per line), but wouldn't it be a not bad direction to use > 80 characters for all commands? > Well, that's the question du jour, isn't it? The 80 character limit is based on punch cards, and really has no place in modern systems. While gnu systems are stuck in the past, many other ones have moved on to more sensible defaults: $ wget --help | wc -L 110 $ gcloud --help | wc -L 122 $ yum --help | wc -L 122 git is an interesting one, as they force things through a pager for their help, but if you look at their raw help text files, they have plenty of times they go past 80 when needed: $ wc -L git/Documentation/git-*.txt | sort -g | tail -20 109 git-filter-branch.txt 109 git-rebase.txt 116 git-diff-index.txt 116 git-http-fetch.txt 117 git-restore.txt 122 git-checkout.txt 122 git-ls-tree.txt 129 git-init-db.txt 131 git-push.txt 132 git-update-ref.txt 142 git-maintenance.txt 144 git-interpret-trailers.txt 146 git-cat-file.txt 148 git-repack.txt 161 git-config.txt 162 git-notes.txt 205 git-stash.txt 251 git-submodule.txt So in summary, I think 80 is a decent soft limit, but let's not stress out about some lines going over that, and make a hard limit of perhaps 120. See also: https://hilton.org.uk/blog/source-code-line-length Cheers, Greg P.S. I know this won't change anything right away, but it will get the conversation started, so we can escape the inertia of punch cards / VT100 terminals someday. :)