I spend a lot of time in front of Emacs in a terminal window, and I share my configuration across all my computers. At work I have a large monitor, so I split the emacs frame into 3 side-by-side 80-column windows. At home I have a smaller screen with room only enough for two windows. Sometimes I just use the laptop display. To share the same configuration file, I use the following snippet:
(defun smart-split ()
"Split the frame into 80-column sub-windows, and make sure no window has
fewer than 80 columns."
(interactive)
(cl-lables ((smart-split-helper (lambda (w)
(if (> (window-width w) (* 2 81))
(let ((w2 (split-window w 82 t)))
(smart-split-helper w2))))))
(smart-split-helper nil)))
(smart-split)
The smart-split
function split the emacs frame into a maximum number of 80-column windows. A very portable solution.