I spend most of my conscious hours in front of Emacs in a terminal window these days, and I share my configuration across all my computers. At work I have a huge 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. 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)
(defun smart-split-helper (w)
"Helper function to split a given window into two, the first of which has
80 columns."
(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.