Russ Allbery wrote on 05/18/2011 12:53 PM: > 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.
Having been, in years past, the person responsible for maintaining the man page formatting tools for SGI and Cray systems, I vote for the 80-column-or-narrower widths. We did 72 columns iirc, on the Cray systems. Russ's rationale below is the big reason. > >> 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.) > +1 on behalf of those of us with aging eyes. -- Peter Karman . http://peknet.com/ . [email protected]
