I object!

For whatever reasons I find man pages perfectly readable in my wide-ass terminals (> 100 character cells).  The current behavior of man-db's man program has been the default for quite some time and I am anxious to cement it is as the new de facto standard.  :P

I've used big terminals (often maximized to the screen dimensions) on Debian systems for over 20 years and I remember lamenting the waste of terminal space when viewing man pages before Colin got to it.

For example, I use the following in the course of preparing word-diffs when hacking on the groff man pages:

alias manhj="MANWIDTH=\${MANWIDTH:-80} man --nh --nj"

I propose that users with Steve's preference do something similar.

Why not make users with my preference set some new MANMAXWIDTH variable to a blank value, or to some special string like "inf"? A set but empty value turns upon too fine a knife edge to be good user ergonomics, and furthermore encourages poor shell programming practice through the user of the ${FOO-bar} parameter expansion rather than the plainly superior ${FOO:-bar}.

A special out-of-band value is superior, but either approach requires complicating the logic of the above, requiring users to write if statements and comparisons, adding distressing bulk to the example idiom above.

I think an adequate fix for this report is to document the above example or a similar one in the man page.