# Display lines and UMN gopher

As Matto described in his recent post[1], the gopher RFC suggests we
should keep our display lines below 70 characters.

Having read the RFC, and made every attempt to keep my gopher hole
within specification, I had arrived at 69 as the magic number for
line length. My posts are also wrapped at 69 characters, as it is a
comfortable line length to read[2].

I have taken some pride in my gopher hole being RFC compliant,
compatible with all gopher clients and having unique content and
services.

When it was pointed out to me a couple of days ago that my newly
added date format was being truncated on an 80 character terminal. I
was shocked that I could have made such an oversight and immediately
set to put it right. This was at 12am, just as I was preparing to go
to bed...

Having amended my entire gopher hole to reduce the maximum number of
characters to 67, to stop the truncation. It suddenly dawned on me
that the report only mentioned the menu items, and if it weren't
for the '..' suggesting truncation the entire line would have fitted
on screen.

I reverted my changes to the ASCII banner and section headings and
looked to find the UMN gopher source code[3].


## Into the rabbit hole

It took me some time digging until I found what I was looking for[4].
The *magic* happens inside DisplayTitle(), maxlength is the result of
COLS-13.

COLS I assume comes from curses knowledge of your terminal
capabilities, 13 is what is reserved for the info in the left margin.

The margin takes the following form: ' -->  [XXXX] '

When accounting for the entire line length UMN gopher reserves 13
characters for the left margin, even though it doesn't always use
them.  Essentially it calculates whether to truncate your line as
follows: line <= COLS-13.

If your display line is 69, under 70 as per the RFC, then it
calculates a deficit of 2 characters on an 80 character display...

I've never had cause to look at the source for UMN gopher before or
really critically assess the user interface.


## Initial observations

* There is a lot of wasted space within the margin.
	'--> ' could be replaced with terminal foreground/background
	invert, to indicate the selected item.  This would save 3 or 4
	characters in one swoop.

* The margin width is variable depending on the index number.
	I think that this should be fixed as when it expands it pushes
	the menu title across to the right reducing usable space.


## Summary

Is it a bug, is it a feature? Should it it be condemned forevermore,
or should it be fixed?

Lynx suffers in the same regard when it comes to wasted space and
variable width info margin. I actually think it's worse...

Even with all its quirks and occasional crashes, it is still my
preferred client.


## References

[1](gopher://box.matto.nl/0/shorter-lines-in-gophermap.txt)
[2](https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability)
[3](https://github.com/jgoerzen/gopher.git)
[4](https://github.com/jgoerzen/gopher/blob/master/gopher/manager.c)