Gray Vertical Live in NS3

TurnipTruck

I just switched to NS3 from 2.whatever today. (Hopefully the bugs are out by now)

So what is the gray vertical line toward the left side of the code window?

ericmedley

That line is something found in a lot of development programs. The idea of it is to demark where 80 chars is on the screen. I don't know if it's for 80 chars or not now. but that's where it came from. It can be moved to different locations. You can disable it in the preferences. I know I do. I couldn't care less where 80 chars is...

TurnipTruck

Thanks. I disabled it. Never seen such a fella before.

ericmedley

no problem...

It's kinda old skool. In fact, so Old Skool they had to tear the skool down.

DHawthorne

It's a holdover from when your standard dot-matrix printer output was 80 characters wide. If you keep in the line, you know it will print nice .

PhreaK

DHawthorne wrote: »

It's a holdover from when your standard dot-matrix printer output was 80 characters wide. If you keep in the line, you know it will print nice .

Older than that - it dates back to IBM's old punch cards, and was then adopted by the VT100 and printers.

Although it may be old skool it's still relevant. Limiting line length to 80 characters provides decent readability (although screen resolution has increased, the human eye hasn't changed all that much in the past 50 years or so), helps to limit the complexity of lines of code and assists in preventing excessive indentation. That being said. there is no physical reason to limit the length so if wrapping a line will reduce readability there's no point doing so.