Tom Christiansen <[email protected]> writes: > Manpages *can* get linewrapped or snipped at 65 columns. Currently > they seem actually to work on at least one system, but I haven't > done any checking around.
Most of the man implementations I've seen recently have started wrapping at the terminal width or at 80 columns, but older man implementations definitely wrapped narrower. I would expect to see problems, if any, on systems like IRIX, old Solaris, that sort of thing. I no longer have readily available the wide variety of UNIX implementations I used to have to check things like this. > But I very much feel the table would be easier to read this way: [...] > Than I would this: > 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 > 8 > > 12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890 > Left Right Description and pseudocode > =============================================================== > Any undef check whether Any is undefined > like: !defined Any I actually prefer the second one even with a wide window because my eyes don't get lost during carriage return. But that may just be me. One thing that's worth remembering when it comes to going to longer line widths is that while most people have the screen real estate to do this these days with average fonts, there are a fair number of people with minor or moderate eye problems that make "average" fonts pretty unappealing and annoying, or even unreadable. And the first example made the "Like" column mostly unuseful if one can't widen the screen. (Forced line wrapping on a narrow screen isn't *too* bad for text, but it makes code almost impossible to follow, at least for me.) -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
