/dev/knill

notion: set full width off 🙏

Please stop toggling notion to ‘Full Width’.

notion wide toggle option

In notion there’s a toggle option that makes the text in the page take up the full width.

This is not friendly to read. This site is formatted into a column because it means that your eyes don’t have to travel as far to get to the beginning of the line. This is the same reason that;

  • books are printed in A5
  • that newspapers have columns
  • etc.

When turned on, it looks like this;

notion full width toggled on

Even if you make this image larger, and try and read the content, it’s incredibly difficult.

notion full width toggled off

This is the same page, with the full width toggle OFF.

I have a theory that the setting is used by writers who have two windows side by side on their screen. Or writers who write predominantly on a small screen, like a 11" or 13" laptop screen. Toggling full width ON in this case would take up the “full width” of a small container, which is still not so wide that it suffers from the “hard to read” dynamic seen in the screenshots above. Setting to full width but within a small container is wider than the column view of full width OFF, but narrower than the wide view of full-screen full width ON.

This theory reminds me of the sites that were designed on a 32" screen attached to a MacBook, and are awful to use for all the customers on a 13" windows laptop using internet explorer.

Think about who will consume the page, and toggle full width off.