Is there a limit to the number of characters that get shown on the screen ? Or it all depends on the font size ?

I would think that the only *virtual* limit would be how many characters can fit into (video?) memory (and nowadays, that's a ridiculous amount). I would say that you could probably have a full-screen framebuffer terminal with a tiny 4 pt. font on a 1280x1024 screen (or something like that) and still have it work just fine.

..but of course there's the DPI of the display to take into account, too.

Typically a console has a 80-characters width, but it can be extended to 132 depending on the VGA/VESA video mode used. It depends on the capability of your video-card and on what modes are supported. In other words you cannot choose any combination of rows x columns size. To see which modes are available for you graphic card, you can try to set vga=ask among the boot parameters. Then at reboot you will be prompted to scan for available modes and it will show a list of available column x rows sizes together with the octal code of the related video mode. Nowadays a common choice for video mode is vga=791 which means a resolution of 1024x768 and 16-bit colors. On my monitor it brings to a console size of 128 x 48 characters.

Thanks to both of you.

and colucix, you gave a great explanation.

Thanks again.

Can we somehow determine through a program the set width of a screen ? since you said that "typically" a comp screen has 80 char width and it can be "extended" !

You can get the width using echo $COLUMNS. Not sure about height, though.

Thanks Mr. Code,
Does this mean that 105 chars can be displayed on my screen horizontally ?

Yes. You can test by creating a two line file called ruler:
and then, in a resizeable terminal emulatorthe resizing the window and repeating the last two commands.

I've got more columns than you, Anisha!
or:

Thanks for the effort, Charles.

You meant to tell me that $COLUMNS is changeable at the run time ? What was that PS1 ? Ctrl-c didn't work after that, I had to press Ctrl-d to get out.

You must have a wide screen LCD, Brian..

@brianL

Mine comes close when I have Terminal maximized :

EDIT: More on-topic:

If you're using a terminal emulator, yes. If you're using a framebuffer console, no (at least I don't think).

EDIT EDIT: One last thing: another + to Compiz is that the "Window Resize Info" plugin shows the size of a terminal window in characters, not pixels, so I always know how big it is in chars without having to check $COLUMNS etc.

No, it's a 4:3, 19", 1280x1024.

Yeah, that 180 of mine was from Konsole maximised.

1280x1024 is 5:4, actually. The 4:3 equivalent would be 1280x960.

Ooops! brianL is wrong again! Yes, it is a 5:4 monitor.