COLUMNS env var
===============

setting env var to a number greater than 0 will make the terminal resize to that number of columns.

Date: November 26, 2025

setting `COLUMNS` env var to a number greater than 0 will make the terminal resize to that number of columns.

``` bash
COLUMNS=80 uvx --from rich-cli rich myscript.py
```

!!! NOTE

 Not all programs respct the `COLUMNS` env var, but rich does, and a lot of
 stuff I'm building uses rich.

I discovered this when I was trying to make a low effort readme generated from
the code, but did not depend on the size of terminal it was ran on.

``` bash
# justfile
readme:
 echo "# Workspaces" > README.md
 echo "" >> README.md
 echo '``` bash' >> README.md
 COLUMNS=80 ./workspaces.py --help >> README.md
 echo '```' >> README.md
```