In article <87oca1b8ba.fsf....@metalzone.distorted.org.uk>, m...@distorted.org.uk (Mark Wooding) wrote:
> Vertical space is a limiting factor on how much code one can see at a > time. Yup. Over three decades of programming, my personal upper bound for how long a function should be has always been "fits on one screen". In the old days, that meant a CRT with 24 lines (by 80 columns). These days, it means about 100-120 lines (depending on how squinty-eyed I'm willing to go). Thus, over the years, my idea of how long a function can be has grown several-fold. I still try to keep things well under 100 lines per function. I'm willing, however, to tolerate anything up to where I can no longer see the entire thing and the font is still big enough to read easily. Of course, in the real old days, with 66 lines to an 11-inch page of line printer paper, and 8 foot high ceilings, you could tape about 500 lines of code to the wall, but I digress :-) > I've no idea how people manage with these ridiculous widescreen monitors. My 15-inch laptop has 1680 x 1050 resolution (the new high-res flavor of the MacBook Pro). I love it. Mostly I use the screen real estate for one main shell window where I'm doing most of my work, and a variety of other windows (browser, pdf viewer, etc) which contain documents I'm referring to in support of what I'm doing in my main window. At work, I've got two 1920 x 1080 monitors side-by-side. I find I don't use the second monitor much. I'll generally shove some windows over there which I watch, but almost never interact with. Mostly things tailing log files or some other kind of status monitor function. I also find that to keep the angle of view comfortable, I can't sit as close to the monitors as I usually keep my laptop screen. So, I have to make the font size a little larger, which in turn means fewer lines of code visible. Ergonomics is complicated. I'm thinking of rotating the monitors 90 degrees, running them in side-by-side portrait mode. I know X11 can handle the video rotation, but I'm not sure I've got the right mounting brackets. Another factor is that the Mac display is sharp as a tack compared to my big LCD panels at work. I think it's party the display hardware itself, and partly that the Mac's text rendering just blows Linux out of the water. I can easily read text on my laptop at much smaller font sizes than I can on my desk monitors at work. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
