A simple question with an easy answer: how many characters long is your terminal in full screen? I am working on a torrent searching script, and I am interested in the statistical max dimensions of a terminal. Thanks in advance.

Mine is 226... Often when writing code people will adhere to max line widths such as 80 or 100. However, if you are writing a script, why not just get the width in the script and render based on that? For example stty size, tput cols or echo "$COLUMNS".

Not sure if it helps, but traditionally the max was 80 columns by 25 rows on old computers, and that became a standard.

Nowadays we can be much bigger with a terminal emulator window, but 80x25 is still the "standard" and most terminal emulators default to that size when you open their window.

It's not the max size possible, but if you're making software for terminal, that really should be your target size imo

There are torrent variables that need to be shown in a row: category, date, name, size, uploader, seeders and leechers. This not plausiblel in 80x25, thus the question for fullscreen.

Thx, if many users respond with less than 140, I will need to find a solution involving truncating strings and using tput cols

$ tput cols lines  
173  
42  

Drop-down terminal (landscape): 211
Drop-down terminal (portrait): 117
Full-screen terminal (landscape): 236
Full-screen terminal (portrait): 131
Phone terminal (landscape): 212
Phone terminal (portrait): 97

If you’re writing software for Linux terminal that needs more than 80x25 you absolutely need to use some kind of scrolling.

Do not require more rows and columns than the standard. You will be causing yourself a bunch of headaches as everyone asks you why their specific terminal is breaking in a unique way and then you’ll have to explain in every bug or crash report why you couldn’t just use curses like a normal person.

Also it’s rude. If you’re targeting more than 80x25 you’re not writing for the terminal.

A long time ago when I wrote a script to do something like this I had two “pages”, one of which had the important stuff and the other with the things that didn’t matter all the time like all the different dates and tracker fqdn etc. if I had to do it over again I’d use ncurses.

My laptop is 192x54 in the virtual terminal and 190x47 in Gnome Terminal.

Whatever program you write definitely needs to support an 80 column display though. A 5" phone screen is going to need a much larger font than a 14" laptop screen.

I appreciate the time you dedicated to answer. I was hoping for a number as an answer to a simple question.

Thanks. The ideal should be 140 chars. I will work out truncating the torrent name column in order for everything to fit in 80 char terminals, although it would not be very functional.

Apologies. Sometimes your boy can run off at the mouth.

80x25

No worries, I am just trying to estimate how much I need to truncate the torrent names to be functional for the average user.

Just to give you an idea:

Is that a one shot or are you redrawing it periodically?

there is a simple read after the table, so no, it is drawn once. I trid to put a cursor on it, but felt unresponsive and lagging, thus read , kept simple

I wouldn’t worry about it then. If it just spits out a table and lands the user back at their command prompt then you can rely on standard output handling in their environment.

400x100 fullscreen xterm ppl will be happy with that, 80x25 default modeliners will know how to handle it and you won’t even get complaints from the tmux people.

Maybe limit each column to 40 characters. If your torrent titles have more than 40 characters of preamble it’s time to switch release groups…