What were they thinking?

[wotw]

This is the screen from my new Dell laptop computer, running Windwos 10:

Comments

[underwatercolor]

I would say neither. The shape and resolution of the screen on most laptops is optimized for HD TV and movies, not tiling of command windows. Most computer users don't care about command windows.

Also, I believe if you change the font on a command window, it will change its size, if that matters.

[drwex]

Yeah, this. Your screen is not sized for viewing fixed-width font at 80 characters per line and hasn't been for at least three decades.

That said, there are some limitations involved in the width-vs-price calculations. The wider the screen the more expensive (and heavier) the electronics behind it need to be. One of the trade-offs made by laptop mfrs is optimizing price/weight/function. I am guessing they've optimized in this way, which isn't the way you want to use it.

[yesthattom]

Not directly related, but one thing I find useful is some bash aliases that tell the window to resize.

Is you use Cygwin and Bash, you can use these:

alias w24='printf '\''\e[8;24;80t'\'''
alias w60='printf '\''\e[8;60;80t'\'''

Now I can type "w24" to get back to a 24x80, and w60 to get a window that (for me) is as tall as my screen.

[ceo]

Wait... Can you not actually arbitrarily change the size of a terminal window on Windows?

Seriously?!

I mean, I know that the command line is a complete non-entity for 99.9% of Windows users, but still.

[wotw]

You can resize the window, but if you want (at least) 24 rows and 80 columns, and if you want a readable 10-point font, that sets a minimum size.

Font sizes are a variable

[jbsegal]

For people with better eyesight than you, that can be set for 6 windows. For people with worse, that can be a perfect 4.
Or, you know that terminal windows can be any HxW (rowsXcolumns) that you want them to be, right?

[wotw]

But there does seem to be a standard default size for a command window, across applications. The Windows command prompt, the 4nt command prompt, the Cygwin command prompt, the SecureCRT ssh window, etc,etc, all open by default at 24 x 80, with the same 10-point font.

And there are good reasons not to change that 24 x 80 because I (and I assume most people) have got a lifetime's worth of scripts that assume they are running in a 24 x 80 window. Also, there are plenty of applications that assume (by default) that they are running in 24 x 80 windows, and behave badly when they're not. Several IRC clients, for example, behave this way.

So I think that deviating from 24 x 80 is not such a simple matter. Changing font size, of course, is a simple matter, but presumably that default font size is there because it's the one that most people find most comfortable.

[jbsegal]

I suspect they all open with the same default font because it's set as the system-wide default.
I know that I have changed that font in every windows-based (and most linux-based) (and many mac-based) terminals that I have worked with for the past 25 years. A default is set because it's adequate for most people, not because it's BEST for any particular person.

Most people who have a fair number of scripts either just don't care about the terminal size or have their script READ the terminal size and deal with it.

I have never (or at least in memory) seen an IRC client that can't deal with a window as large as I choose to make it. I suggest you're using bad - or at least old - irc clients.

Changing from 80x24 is dirt simple for 95% of the .05% of the population that uses terminal windows.

[wotw]

I can see changing the 24 (though I'd much rather have a third 24-row window than have two oversized windows) but changing the 80 seems pointless. No matter how wide I make my windows, all of my files are at most 80 characters wide,so I'm just going to have a bunch of useless white space in the window instead of a bunch of useless blue space outside the window.