Solving wide code

Question

This SE site has a lot of long code postings. Usually these are just copy pasted from actual source code.

The maximum line width before a horizontal scrollbar appears, seems to be only 80 characters. Times when 80 was considered an optimal maximum line width are long gone.

For other SE sites, I feel it's the posters duty to make sure the code is readable, and only the necessary code is presented. For Code Review I do feel you should be able to just post code without having to edit it for better viewing.

Several proposals have already been done:

• A stack exchange brand 'pastebin'.
• Viewing code in a new window.
• Collapsible code blocks.

Perhaps a simple or intelligent wordwrap is also suitable. Consider the revision of this question I posted as something I would like to see automated.

UPDATE:

I forgot to mention, couldn't a different column layout work as well? Where the code/question part resizes freely to the remaining space, and only the right column is fixed?

Answer 1

The only thing I can really think of is making the font smaller for the moment. edit: this is done.

It is true that we expect more code here than on, say, Stack Overflow .. but even for a code review, you should strive to provide just the relevant code and not force people to read reams of your code to get to the "good bits".

A great code review request is scoped to the correct amount of code.

A bad code review request is dumping thousands of lines of code in people's laps and expecting them to critique it for you.