Modern laptop screens are 16:9 rather than the traditional 4:3. They're also much higher resolution. Could you take advantage of this for programming? It's helpful to see a lot of text on your screen at once for programming, but we're somewhat inflexible about the shape of the text, since it's not easy to reformat program source code for wider and narrower windows.
The traditional terminal format was 80x24 or 80x25, the former of
which is also the default size for xterm and gnome-terminal; each
glyph contained roughly 5x8 pixels which were almost square. There's
a "5x8" font that ships with X11 that shows what this looked like; try
xterm -fn 5x8. There's also a 5x7 font, which is just about as
readable, and there are somewhat less readable 4x6 fonts floating
around. The appearance on an LCD is a little blockier than it was on
the hardware terminals, because their pixels were not neat little
squares like LCD pixels, but rather fuzzy dots or horizontal segments
of scan lines.
However, modern LCD displays actually have not only grayscale but also three times the horizontal resolution of a CRT with the same nominal number of pixels. This extra horizontal resolution can be, and is, used to dramatically the readability of text, which correspondingly allows the use of smaller fonts.
So let's suppose, conservatively, that we can use 3x6 fonts, which are really 9x6 --- 54 subpixels per glyph rather than the traditional 32, which ought to be eminently readable. How much text can you fit on the screen?
Suppose you break up the screen horizontally into 80-column columns. Each of these will be 240 pixels wide; if you have a modest 1024x600 screen (very slightly narrower than 16:9) then you can divide 960 of the 1024 pixels into four 80-column columns, with another 64 pixels left over for margins, scrollbars, or other UI chrome. Each of these columns then holds 100 6-pixel-high lines of text, for a total of 400 lines, or six printed standard 80x66 pages.