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Dear CLI utility writers (*cough* nmcli *cough*) that assume a terminal width larger than 80 columns,

Could you just... NOT, please?

Use two lines per entry if you have to, pad it out, abbreviate something, I don't care. Just don't put important details after the 80th column, please! ๐Ÿ˜ข

(I standardize on 80 columns because that's what old terminals used, and I'm doing more than one thing at a time, always. Thank you =)

reshared this

in reply to D. Moonfire

@dmoonfire

I use $(tput cols) in my scripts because $COLUMNS is only populated if running directly on a tty (i.e. not piped)

in reply to D. Moonfire

@dmoonfire

tput is very useful for resetting the terminal, querying terminal settings, and setting terminal colors.

Unfortunately, the manpage is *awful*

You can also get terminal status from stty, which is a bit more common than tput

in reply to R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd:

Have you ever tried the hollywood package/binary you can get on Debian? It makes a hollywood-style hacker screen by running tons of utilities tiled, but on a laptop screen most of them just say "please make your terminal screen wider". ๐Ÿ˜‚
in reply to a mercurial mess of random thoughts

@writeblankspace @amin

Of course! ๐Ÿ˜‚

IIRC, cmatrix also has a "nomoresecrets" mode ร  la Sneakers (1992)

(If you haven't seen that film, you *must* go watch it. Its basically Hackers (1995), but less of an underworld vibe. But its got Robert Redford!)

And if either of you haven't seen Hackers (1995), WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!?!???

in reply to R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd:

I actually don't think the commands should care about or respect your terminal width any more than it does your terminal height. `less` and similar can provide horizontal scrolling if necessary. And, it quite annoys me when I tool builds in a pager rather than using $PAGER from my environment.

That said, for reasons completely unrelated to terminal width, line/field lengths do need to be controlled. Otherwise human eye tracking stops working well.

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