Subjectively, I feel that at some width, I lose the ability to take in lines at a single glance, and spend more time in horizontal head movement. I rarely test

Subjectively, I feel that at some width, I lose the ability to take in lines at a single glance, and spend more time in horizontal head movement. I rarely test this in code, but in web pages that use the entire width of the window, it's pretty evident to me that my reading speed goes down when the text gets too wide. Like Linus, I find 80 columns too narrow a limitation (and I got started on a 40x25 system, not even 80x25), but it would seem useful to me to standardize on some sensible maximum width, e.g. 100 or 120 columns.