Tweak Prettier SEP Formatting Requirements: Max Line Width

[leighmcculloch]

Hi all,

I'd like to tweak the prettier SEP formatting requirements for max line width.

In almost all ways the markdown formatting requirement for SEPs that was introduced in #1360 have been wonderful.

The one way it hasn’t been has been the 120 character line length requirement. On anything screen that isn’t very large, it is typical to see horizontal scrolling, or worse, the text wraps with partial lines.

For example:

To improve the situation we could:

1. remove the max line width and require single line prose, which would rely on IDE soft-wrapping;
2. or, set a max line width that's much more friendlier to small screens.

I'm not partial to either approach. When I polled internally at SDF the feedback I got was 2️⃣ would be better (ref), so I'm starting this conversation with a proposal to do that, with a max line width of 79.

I selected 79 because that is the default max line width in vim and vi. I'm not advocating for anyone to use those editors, but those editors go back far enough that it provides some signal about what's comfortable to fit on desktop screens that are much smaller than the desktop screens that exist today.

I've opened a PR:

• Change SEP format requirements max line width from 120 to 79 #1696

This seems like an okay time to make a disruptive formatting change, because in this moment there is only one SEP currently with open modifications pending. We can prevent impact to that sep by simply not reformatting that one sep in this moment and exclude it from formatting requirements, and follow up once it's activity has lessened. That sep is excluded in the above PR.

[tupui]

What about a compromise to 100 or 88 as we have in Python? The rational there was 79-80 was recommended too and then Guido said at some point it was more of a soft guideline and deviation around 10% was just fine. So people started to use 88 😅

Personally I don't care as long as there is a tool doing this automatically for me.

[leighmcculloch]

tool doing this automatically for me

+1 The repo is setup to use prettier. Running yarn sep-prettify will automatically format any file in the ecosystem/ directory.

[leighmcculloch]

What about a compromise to 100 or 88 as we have in Python?

Because this line length limit affects only markdown, which is naturally dense non-indented text, I don't think longer lengths are beneficial. In code, like Python, Rust, etc, longer line lengths are beneficial because code is always indented and moves right.

I haven't done extensive research, but cursory research shows a lot of commentary from a variety of sources that when it comes to prose, lines at lengths in the range 50-80 characters are better for readability, physical strain, and accessibility tools.