Your lines of text on the screen should never be much wider than your hand at arm's length, ever, for any reason. Not even if it's an example of a one-liner in bash - wrap that line to make it easier to read.

Don't believe me? Angrily click <reply> on this post to tell me what an idiot I am, start to type your reply, and then hold your hand up palm out at arm's length to the screen so it covers up the text box you're typing in.

How big is it?

Told you so, didn't I? And it looks *perfect*.

This is the one case (that I can think of right now) where I don't agree.

As part of a larger script, sure, I agree, wrap the line so it's not way longer than all the other lines.

But a single shell command, in isolation, is always easier to read as a single line, if sufficient horizontal space is available.

This also usually helps in documentation.

Then, later on, often weeks later, I use command history to scroll back through everything I've typed until I find something that looks vaguely like what I originally typed, or I don't find it and figure it all out from scratch again, having totally forgotten about the bash script I wrote.

I suspect this workflow is surprisingly common.

I have a stylebot rule for stackoverflow that makes the default container 150% wider so I can read teh codes without h-scroll.

Also, I don’t always use HN on desktop.

But when I do, that textbox is too narrow for almost every code-related post. And too short in general.

Thankfully there is a sizer handle.

No thanks. Ridiculously short lines are harder to read.

Edit: I also resize the reply text box because it's almost too small to be usable.

"Ridiculously" short is another matter, but by my count, "significantly wider than your hand at arm's length" means well above 20 words per line.

I wouldn't keep a browser at all, I would just read them in Emacs all the time or from the command line. I would also be able to use my preferred visual theme with the entire web, and not have to look at some really nasty web designs from time to time, albeit I do agree that as a game dev (long time ago) I do like when I see pretty graphic design.

However, I am not sure how my bank will do and all the other web services in just plain text. Perhaps it is possible, perhaps not?

e.g. From https://www.pilledtexts.com/files/nick-land/february.txt

> “This can’t go on,” he said. “It’s too blatantly wrong. It’s insolence.”

What more do you want? :D

No thanks, I'll take fullwidth content anytime over that....

Otherwise, the other option is to scale up thr text size, but that takes up precious vertical space on wide screens, and doesn't increase information density.

Obviously, text columns may only make sense it certain scenarios - a minimum amount of text might be required to justify a second column as opposed to just limiting the width of the first column.