Re:Linus on Line Breaks (2020)
by dan-robertson on Sunday November 28, 2021 @08:01PM
(#29375103)
I think I heard somewhere that the studies about line length don’t actually give very strong evidence in favour of short lines. On the other hand, I don’t have a source for that. Do you know if they are any good or is this just repeating common wisdom?
Some arguments in favour of longer lines would be:
- monospaced fonts are relatively wide so the line is not long in terms of the number of characters
- there can be a lot of non-length on the left hand side due to indentation (especially in Linux where tabs are wide)
- programmers are relatively literate and so might perform better than average at finding the start of the line
- editor features like line highlighting can help to find the line
- source code has a very ragged edge and so it is easier to find the start of the line than in dense prose.
- magazines or their readers prefer narrow columns for stylistic reasons. E.g. newspapers sometimes have very narrow columns that lead to intraword spacing that makes things hard to read
Some arguments in favour of longer lines would be:
- monospaced fonts are relatively wide so the line is not long in terms of the number of characters
- there can be a lot of non-length on the left hand side due to indentation (especially in Linux where tabs are wide)
- programmers are relatively literate and so might perform better than average at finding the start of the line
- editor features like line highlighting can help to find the line
- source code has a very ragged edge and so it is easier to find the start of the line than in dense prose.
- magazines or their readers prefer narrow columns for stylistic reasons. E.g. newspapers sometimes have very narrow columns that lead to intraword spacing that makes things hard to read