We could also all go back to 800x600 monitors. That way, no one would have to be subjected to writing the 10 lines of css to make text heavy sites more readable ;)
No, because then you'd have a short line of text that takes up a huge amount of space.
Your lines of text on the screen should never be much wider than your hand at arm's length, ever, for any reason. Not even if it's an example of a one-liner in bash - wrap that line to make it easier to read.
Don't believe me? Angrily click <reply> on this post to tell me what an idiot I am, start to type your reply, and then hold your hand up palm out at arm's length to the screen so it covers up the text box you're typing in.
Decades of research show that long line lengths cause people to read more slowly, although it is of course possible that you process text differently than most.
"Ridiculously" short is another matter, but by my count, "significantly wider than your hand at arm's length" means well above 20 words per line.
When writing outside of a terminal, I wrap single-line shell commands with backslashes and space indentation. The breaks are at logical clauses, as if writing a conventional programming language. I find this much more readable than the alternatives. Often my terminal will also get it this way, from a copy-paste.
If I have to do it twice I stick it in a proper script, with some comments, so I remember what it all does next time I go to do it. I do this particularly for stuff like complex ffmpeg filter chains where I need to do a lot of stuff to a video file. By simply running the bash script, at some later date I can get it to remind me what it does, and suitably mangle the video file.
Then, later on, often weeks later, I use command history to scroll back through everything I've typed until I find something that looks vaguely like what I originally typed, or I don't find it and figure it all out from scratch again, having totally forgotten about the bash script I wrote.
Yeah, but how many times do you see a one-liner that's in a nice little boxout, but there's a scrollbar and you need to slide it backwards and forwards to read the whole thing?
