Give Every Column Its Fair Share: Per-Column Widths in the jterm Table Widget

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tables are the workhorse of every BBS screen. Message lists, who’s online, file areas, the sysop’s session dashboard — all of them are just rows and columns. And until this week, every column in a jterm Table got the same slice of the screen. Seven columns at 80 characters? Eleven characters each, whether you’re rendering a two-letter status flag or a 24-character username.

Equal division is the correct default — it’s fair, it’s predictable, and it requires the developer to decide nothing. But “requires no decisions” is a polite way of saying “offers no control.” A session table’s Screen column wants room to breathe; its Spy column (a two-character checkbox) is wasted space at eleven characters wide. The information density of the screen was being decided by arithmetic, not by design.

Ui on Phosphor BBS

Give Every Column Its Fair Share: Per-Column Widths in the jterm Table Widget