Wednesday, May 23, 2007

The virtues of limited terminal width

I've noticed that a great benefit of reading mail in an 80-column X terminal is that it acts as a simple filter: if a thread drifts so far to the right that I can no longer read the Subject: line, it's probably not worth my time to read it and I can kill the whole thing.

I wonder what sorts of gains in free time and productivity I could realize by shrinking my terminals to widths of 70, 60, or even 40 characters wide?

1 Comments:

At 12:23 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I would definitely agree with you on this. Somehow 80 seems 'right'. To set my terminal width to any more than that feels weird, and makes me a little nervous.

In addition to the subject being too long, I'd say if the body doesn't wrap correctly, it isn't worth worrying about.

 

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