<story><title>Git Things</title><url>https://matklad.github.io/2023/12/31/git-things.html#Git-Things</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gverrilla</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a beginner dev and I find it very odd both that vscode tries to limit my commit messages to 50 or 55 characters, and also that python linters want to make my lines of code so small. What&amp;#x27;s the reason behind this? Old small monitors of the past?&lt;p&gt;I also don&amp;#x27;t get why fediverse, mastodon seem to limit characters on a post, mimicking the stupid twitter, which is a niche social network. I way be wrong about the limit (never tried), but these platforms feel for ignorant outsiders like twitter-clones with a different infrastructure.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>heads</author><text>There are plenty of good reasons for short line lengths.  Two factors constrain the max line length down to something not much more than 80 columns: side-by-side diffs and waning eyesight.&lt;p&gt;In-line diffs mix the flow of change in with the flow of execution, both going down the page.  Side-by-side diffs makes those two axes orthogonal.  With decorations (either in a terminal or a code review tool) even 80 column code requires a fairly small font.  Editing two panes of code only needs 161 columns but a decorated patch might be more like 170.&lt;p&gt;The point font size is its height in increments of 1&amp;#x2F;72”, and most fonts are half as wide as their point height.  The largest font one can use on a 27” monitor (24” wide) is 20pt.  My eyes get knackered at anything smaller than 18pt.</text></comment>
<story><title>Git Things</title><url>https://matklad.github.io/2023/12/31/git-things.html#Git-Things</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gverrilla</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a beginner dev and I find it very odd both that vscode tries to limit my commit messages to 50 or 55 characters, and also that python linters want to make my lines of code so small. What&amp;#x27;s the reason behind this? Old small monitors of the past?&lt;p&gt;I also don&amp;#x27;t get why fediverse, mastodon seem to limit characters on a post, mimicking the stupid twitter, which is a niche social network. I way be wrong about the limit (never tried), but these platforms feel for ignorant outsiders like twitter-clones with a different infrastructure.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JimBlackwood</author><text>Hah, this reminds me of my C++ professor requiring a max line width of 80 characters. My first question was “why not more!?” aswell.&lt;p&gt;He would have the homework submissions compiled to LaTeX and printed out - then he would write comments by hand. 80 characters was what would fit on a line. If you had more characters, lines wrapped wrongly and you’d get incorrect looking code - so he refused to grade.&lt;p&gt;I’ve since warmed up to the max line width idea. It’s nice to be able to read code on a small width window (I’ll rarely have a single full screen window with just code) and ensure each line is a valid syntax (and not unreadable due to softwrap in the editor). But I still think 80 chars is a bit extreme. 120 is nicer in my opinion.</text></comment>