Re: Changing line widths in the Emacs source code

[David Koppelman]

Keep it at 80 columns, it's a widely adopted standard.

I keep my Emacs frames 80 columns wide because that fits many coding
styles, including my own work. I'd hate to see all those line
continuation characters when visiting elisp files.

I don't think there's any way to agree on an optimal width for E-lisp
code, or for material in other languages. Too large a width will tire
those reading code, the same holds for text (as someone here pointed
out), which is why newspaper columns are narrow.

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Now for the most controversial suggestion of all: Make the Emacs code
> wider!
>
> Emacs has tried to keep the line width of the source code at 80
> characters since Emacs was created.  It was a good choice (perhaps the
> only) back then, but most screens are wide and short these days, and the
> folding contortions we have to do to make everything fit in 80
> characters is sometimes annoying, and leads to code that's awkward to
> read.
>
> So my suggestion is: Change the default to 100.
>
> (This, of course, doesn't mean that we change any of the existing code,
> but we stop formatting all new code to fit within 80 columns, and
> instead aim for 100 instead.)