Switch from 88 character lines back to 80

As much as I like black, and as much as I understand its advantages, its default maximum line length drives me crazy. The maximum of 80 is there for a good reason, as terminals usually have this limit. So if edit in a traditional editor, or look at the docs or the code in a terminal, a longer line-length makes working very difficult. And this is not that uncommon, think, e.g., about working on a server without GUI. I guess this is a plea that not everyone is working in a Notebook or with Atom, Sublime, VSCode etc.

I suggest to restrict the max-line-length to 80. As far as I could see, there are three places currently with a max-line-length:

verde-master/> grep -rin 'line-length'
    .pylintrc:109: max-line-length=100
    .stickler.yml:6: max-line-length: 88
    setup.cfg:10: max-line-length = 88

I attach here two screenshots, one from GVim and one from an IPython console.

The examples are for documentation, but the same applies for the code.

[djhoese]

FYI @prisae this conversation made me rethink my own strategies for some of the libraries I maintain. I’m thinking about switching to 80 characters for docstrings as it is more likely that people will be looking at documentation on smaller screens. We (again, not a verde maintainer) will prefer 80 characters for code but will allow up to 120 characters if it makes sense (it rarely does).

Thanks for bringing this to my attention as well.

[leouieda]

But then again, maybe, I am just too old school

I constantly struggle with these two sides of myself 😃

So I close this issue, and I apologize for the tempest in a tea pot.

No need to apologize. It’s great that you brought this to my attention and I’ll definitely keep it in mind when starting new projects. I hand’t even considered that this would be a problem.

I suggest to limit docstrings to 80 characters.

That is a sensible thing to do. From the black repo, it seems like they are working on this. When the implement it, we can take another look at converting the repo to 80 chars again.