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! 😢
(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 =)
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OpenComputeDesign
in reply to R. L. Dane • • •James Britt
in reply to R. L. Dane • • •👍
even if you have the width it just gets hard to read.
D. Moonfire
in reply to R. L. Dane • • •$COLUMNSor 78 if I can't find it.R. L. Dane
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)
D. Moonfire
in reply to R. L. Dane • • •R. L. Dane
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
Amin Hollon 🏳
in reply to R. L. Dane • • •hollywoodpackage/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". 😂a mercurial mess of random thoughts
in reply to Amin Hollon 🏳 • • •R. L. Dane
in reply to a mercurial mess of random thoughts • • •@writeblankspace @amin
Of course! 😂
IIRC, cmatrix also has a "nomoresecrets" mode à 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?!?!???
Amin Hollon 🏳
in reply to R. L. Dane • • •R. L. Dane
in reply to Amin Hollon 🏳 • • •It had a crazy all-star cast:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneake…
1992 film directed by Phil Alden Robinson
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)thedoctor
in reply to R. L. Dane • • •Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to R. L. Dane • •R. L. Dane likes this.
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.
in reply to R. L. Dane • • •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.