|80


Default 80 characters line limit
--------------------------------

One can argue that the brain interprets shorter lines better than longer ones.

There's a book that says plain text is more readable at 66 chars per line.

    Bringhurst, R. (1992). Horizontal Motion. The Elements of Typographic Style, 
    pp 25-36. Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks.


Readability: The Optimal Line Length
------------------------------------

    https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

Key Takeaways

    1. The optimal line length for body text is 50–75 characters
    2. Shorter or longer line lengths can hurt readability
    3. Our large-scale testing reveals that text line length often makes product 
    or service descriptions unnecessarily difficult for users to read

Having the right amount of characters on each line is key to the readability 
of your text.

Indeed, it shouldn’t merely be your design that dictates the width of your text 
— the ability of users to easily read through the text should also 
be a critical factor.

Some fundamental exploration of line length and readability was conducted 
by Emil Ruder, a mid-twentieth century Swiss graphic designer.

Ruder concluded that the optimal line length for body text is 50–60 characters 
per line, including spaces (“Typographie”, E. Ruder).

Indeed, our Premium UX research and large-scale e-commerce UX testing reveals 
that long lines of text are typically perceived by users as intimidating 
and overwhelming.

As result, users faced with overly long lines of text are more likely to avoid 
reading the text.

Providing users with text line lengths of 80 characters or fewer is one step 
toward more readable text on a site.

To ensure line lengths don’t exceed 80 characters, the CSS max-width property 
can be set using font-relative lengths of around 70ch or 34em (note that 
this value will need to be adjusted slightly up or down depending 
on the font used).

However, it’s important to keep in mind that line length is only one component 
of text readability.

Additionally, in order to be in compliance with accessibility standards, 
text styling must be able to be set as follows:

    Line height (i.e., the spacing between lines of text): 1.5em (i.e., 
    1.5 times the font size)

    Paragraph spacing: 2em

    Word spacing: 0.16em

    Letter spacing (i.e., tracking): 0.12em


Code length
-----------

The 80/24 rule by Mark Seemann

    https://blog.ploeh.dk/2019/11/04/the-80-24-rule/

Code that fits in your brain.

The human brain can only keep track of about seven things.
    
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two

Write small blocks of code.

The purpose of writing small code is to nudge yourself towards writing readable 
code; code that fits in your brain. The smaller, the better.

If there's any accepted industry standard for maximum line width, it's 80 
characters.

The maximum line count of a code, then, should be 25.

Some additional terminal sizing history in Mike Hoye's recent similarly-named 
post: http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/10/23/80x25/


Examples
--------

Reddit, comment length 100 characters.
    
Google Translate, text length in the form is 61 characters.
    
Aaron Schwartz's blog posts are 61 characters long.
        
    http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/

Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg, blog posts are between 50 and 80 
characters long.
        
    https://hart.pglaf.org/

INSTALLATION NOTES for OpenBSD, text length 70 characters long.
        
    https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.6/amd64/INSTALL.amd64