On Sat, 11 Jul 2020 09:28:45 +0100 Colin Watson <cjwat...@debian.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 11:26:46AM -0400, Steve Izma wrote: > > I think it's an abomination that a man page extends it's line > > length to fit the width of the terminal; built into the macros > > should be a 65- or 70 character maximum width. > > I'd be willing to take a bug report about the way that man-db does > this by default; it's a change I adopted from Andries Brouwer's man > way back in 2001, and I'm certainly prepared to entertain the idea > that a change I made nearly half my life ago might have been wrong. > (However, I would like it as a bug report on e.g. > https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=man-db rather than buried in a > mailing list thread, because my ability to keep track of random > threads isn't quite what it used to be.) > While I agree that a shorter line length is more readable, I frequently exit a manpage, maximise the terminal window, then reopen it when my goal is to quickly scan the page for a relevant option. I find argument lists in particular much easier to look through when they take up fewer lines. Manpages in particular are less likely to have large paragraphs of text, and a long line length commonly reduces an entire topic to a single line which I also find more convenient. Just my 2ยข.
