Line width formatting standard [closed]

Question

Don't compromise readability for dogmatic rules on the exact number of characters in a row. Horizontal scrolling is undesirable but an 81-character line is easier to read than an indentation-confusingly line-wrapped version.

80 characters is likely to be inadaquate for programming styles with large indentations and/or verbose variable names. Keep the amount of logical complexity down to a per-line maximum, not the number of characters.

I stick to the 80 lines rule (And try to convince everyone to do the same). Some reasons:

1. You can open 2 (or more) editors at once.
2. Same thing with compare tools. - most (all?) of them display the two(some three (some more ?)) files side by side.
3. Sometimes you need to work from remote, on a different workstation, or a laptop, and suddenly, your nicely formatted 120 char's to line code looks horrible.

I prefer longer lines for one simple reason: I can fit more code into my window. There is a huge difference between having to scroll vertically to read a function and being able to fit it in a single screen. If everything is line-wrapped so that the function scrolls off the bottom while the right half of my screen is empty, I consider that to be a huge waste. Note that opening two editor windows doesn't help here either.

You should not have to scroll horizontally to read the code. But larger screens does not mean longer lines! There is also a limit to how much there should go on in a single line.

So I say: Keep it at 70-80 chars just as always. Larger screens just means that the IDE as more room.

It also depends on other conventions that you're using. At one job, we were programming in Java and the convention was to use long and descriptive identifiers, which meant that only a couple of them could fit on a line without running into the 80-character limit. I thought that was pretty stupid considering every developer in the company was given a widescreen monitor that could easily fit 200 characters. With hardware consistency like that it makes no sense to enforce a stupidly small line wrap limit.