Improvement: Increase the width of the main text window in sphinx-needs layout

[antonkri]

Important

Make sure to link this issue with the PR for your improvement.

Currently the part in the middle of the window with the main text is not sufficient wide and the left part is too large. Please adapt the layout, that the left part gets smaller and the one in the middle larger.

[danwos]

There are pros and cons for a bigger width of the content area.
And there is a huge discussion online and even in academic research, about the ideal width for documentation.
And the main Sphinx themes have chosen the width based on best practices and research results.

One of the main aspects is, that lines containing more than xxx characters are hard to read and follow.
The eyes may jump to the next line.
But every person has their own experience here, so it's really hard to discuss.

Your screenshot shows a really wide screen, I guess something near QHD.
Is this even the whole screen? As the middle seems to be more on the right side :)
But may be also a bug in the documentation css.

So for me, the goal of documentation is not to fill all the white space, if it gets shown in fullscreen mode, but to be easily readable. Like in newspapers, which also have their text in multiple, even less wide, columns.

But these are just my 2 cents, and I'm open to increasing the width.

[danwos]

I made some tests with different widths. Here are the results:

1. width=88rem (default)

2. width= 100rem

3. width= 100rem + optimized left sidebar (less width, 20% instead of 25%) + max_width for huge, wide screens

Less sidebar is not possible, as SCORE has some long titles and especially subtitles get intended and take therefore even more space.

4. fullscreen: width=100% + optimized left sidebar

I like option 3. most. The fullscreen (option 4) looks good, but the text is really hard to read/follow on my QHD monitor.

I will prepare a PR with option 3.