Re:Ask HN: What's in your .emacs file?
by vasudeva on Thursday October 01, 2009 @10:15PM
(#856296)
The default is 72, in my understanding, because of the historical use of email.
As folks successively quote each other in a thread, the prepending of '>' to the quoted text requires something narrower than 80, else it'll hit the 80-chars-wide limit and wrap.
72 would allow 4 or 8 quote-levels, depending on if your client decides to insert spaces around the '>'.
As folks successively quote each other in a thread, the prepending of '>' to the quoted text requires something narrower than 80, else it'll hit the 80-chars-wide limit and wrap.
72 would allow 4 or 8 quote-levels, depending on if your client decides to insert spaces around the '>'.