Once I outgrew QuickBasic in junior high, I started developing in C in DOS, using RHIDE (it came with DJGPP). RHIDE supported advanced VGA text modes like 128x43, so I've always used blank lines and wide lines when their use made code clearer.

I once had to do maintenance on a Visual Basic project with zero blank lines and minimal comments "to save screen space," even though the developers had decent-sized LCDs.