Ask HN: Max line length for visually impaired Max line length has always been a hot potato. I want to ask the community, especially those who do research in accessibility and those who are visually impaired, what are your experience/understanding of the effect of line length? Specifically, there is a great debate over 80 characters, 88 characters, or even 120 characters. Does max line length matter when visually impaired developers have access to a larger screen? |
This is pretty easy to see for your self, in a browser, on this page by using zoom under "view". Reasonable sized lines and or soft wraps help greatly!
If I need to edit though, I need to navigate to the section in question. My options are to use word by word navigation either from the line start or word by word from the line end (I have short keys for those). If the line is too long, word by word might take quite the number of keystrokes to reach the target position. ctrl+f might be faster. Some vim magic might be useful for such cases, but it would be an overkill.
Separately, there could be some attention fatigue if I need to here only the end of the line, but it is long and my mind wanders while waiting for the interesting bits. This is a corner case though.
I think, it would be ideal if the read and edit are fit for your need (say 80 characters max) inside the editor, but when you are committing, there is a pre-commit hook that would automatically reformat (but your IDE can still display and edit as if it was at 80 max characters).
Now sure how practical that is (and I imagine that isn't really a thing today), but what is your take on that?