Re: Make --help output fit within 80 columns per line

On Fri, Sep 15, 2023 at 11:11 AM torikoshia <torikoshia(at)oss(dot)nttdata(dot)com>
wrote:

> I do not intend to adhere to this rule(my terminals are usually bigger
> than 80 chars per line), but wouldn't it be a not bad direction to use
> 80 characters for all commands?
>

Well, that's the question du jour, isn't it? The 80 character limit is
based on punch cards, and really has no place in modern systems. While gnu
systems are stuck in the past, many other ones have moved on to more
sensible defaults:

$ wget --help | wc -L
110

$ gcloud --help | wc -L
122

$ yum --help | wc -L
122

git is an interesting one, as they force things through a pager for their
help, but if you look at their raw help text files, they have plenty of
times they go past 80 when needed:

$ wc -L git/Documentation/git-*.txt | sort -g | tail -20
109 git-filter-branch.txt
109 git-rebase.txt
116 git-diff-index.txt
116 git-http-fetch.txt
117 git-restore.txt
122 git-checkout.txt
122 git-ls-tree.txt
129 git-init-db.txt
131 git-push.txt
132 git-update-ref.txt
142 git-maintenance.txt
144 git-interpret-trailers.txt
146 git-cat-file.txt
148 git-repack.txt
161 git-config.txt
162 git-notes.txt
205 git-stash.txt
251 git-submodule.txt

So in summary, I think 80 is a decent soft limit, but let's not stress out
about some lines going over that, and make a hard limit of perhaps 120.

See also: https://hilton.org.uk/blog/source-code-line-length

Cheers,
Greg

P.S. I know this won't change anything right away, but it will get the
conversation started, so we can escape the inertia of punch cards / VT100
terminals someday. :)