Re:80 chars per line is great
by VLM on Monday March 25, 2013 @11:31AM
(#5437509)
I think its a given that we'd all agree that writing portrait mode or landscape mode you still fundamentally take about the same number of square inches to do it.
One observation is a fixation on horizontal space never on vertical. If you can't make sense of the big picture without scrolling vertically then you're probably doing it just as wrong as requiring horizontal scrolling to see the little picture.
Two interesting analogies:
RISC vs CISC. Doing something RISC like with simple little operations but the order and block control are super important? Go "RISC" landscape mode. Doing something ridiculous complicated at the operation level? Go "CISC" portrait mode and only do one "weird thing" per line.
Another interesting analogy is I've been in this game since 1981 and the physical display ratio has consistently gotten shorter and fatter every year (kind of like my body, sorta). Like it or not, the style trend is that someday our display hardware is only physically going to be capable of something weird like 800 characters across and only 8 lines up and down. You might have a 10 inch tall display but if 6 vertical inches are taken up by window bars and tab bars and ribbons and 25 toolbars and a bottom status bar, well you're only getting 4 vertical inches. Doesn't matter much if you like it or not, you'd best get used to it as styles don't seem to be changing, not even the 1st or 2nd derivative of the ratio over time...
One observation is a fixation on horizontal space never on vertical. If you can't make sense of the big picture without scrolling vertically then you're probably doing it just as wrong as requiring horizontal scrolling to see the little picture.
Two interesting analogies:
RISC vs CISC. Doing something RISC like with simple little operations but the order and block control are super important? Go "RISC" landscape mode. Doing something ridiculous complicated at the operation level? Go "CISC" portrait mode and only do one "weird thing" per line.
Another interesting analogy is I've been in this game since 1981 and the physical display ratio has consistently gotten shorter and fatter every year (kind of like my body, sorta). Like it or not, the style trend is that someday our display hardware is only physically going to be capable of something weird like 800 characters across and only 8 lines up and down. You might have a 10 inch tall display but if 6 vertical inches are taken up by window bars and tab bars and ribbons and 25 toolbars and a bottom status bar, well you're only getting 4 vertical inches. Doesn't matter much if you like it or not, you'd best get used to it as styles don't seem to be changing, not even the 1st or 2nd derivative of the ratio over time...