If you want the dir listing output in a column, you're just relying on your listing to be wider than 80 characters, it still doesn't columnize unless you pass that point.

Personally, I feel if I made the terminal wider, I'd like to actually use that width.

I suppose an alternative, if you really don't want autosizing, is to make auto-sizing supported without having to explicitly call getterminalsize over and over, perhaps by creating some sentinel value (pprint.AUTOWIDTH or whatever) to make it trivial to do (or to allow those who desire it to use partial binding to make it the default for a session up front).