Line width formatting standard [closed]

Answer 1

I program almost exclusively on a laptop, so I agree with the shorter lines. Granted, I'm usually designing screens for PDAs, so I can get away with it. But if code is shared between developers it will end up on somebody's laptop eventually, and scroll bars make me cry.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.