DECCOLM - 80/132 columns

[schoedel at kw.igs.net]

> I am really not sure what the point is - you can set the window size
> already.

But you can not currently set the number of columns without also specifying the
number of lines. Software writing to the terminal does not necessarily know the
current number of lines; ssh does an admirable job of passing it through,
certainly, but ssh is not the whole world.

> 132 column mode is a vt100-compatibility feature, and the vt100
> had 24 lines of text, so setting these is absolutely correct (and expected
> by those applications - xterm doesn't emulate a dec-vt terminal 
> anymore, so is free to do whatever it wants).

DEC made terminals other than the VT100. The VT4xx and VT5xx support variable
and settable numbers of lines. They're the ultimate ancestor of rxvt-unicode's
support for DECSLPP, among other things often mistaken for "xterm extensions".
You can find manuals for a couple models at vt100.net if you're interested.

-- 
Kevin Schoedel <schoedel at kw.igs.net> VA3TCS