Programming with proportional fonts is great • Hacker News Board

wendroid wrote: post #24

ggruschow wrote: post #21

gvim hates proportional fonts: E596: Invalid font(s) I just can't bring myself to use emacs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) Available for Lunix (Linux / Unixes / etc) http://swtch.com/plan9port/

I'm not sure I'm smart enough to use it, much less understand it. I can understand that it's mouse based though, and I can't grasp how that would be more efficient for the way I code. I am intrigued by the idea of no built-in commands, relying instead on making external commands easy.. I guess I should look at Oberon again too.

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/acme/

Re: Programming with proportional fonts is great

#26

Post by Batsu » Sat, Jan 16, 2010, 3:25 PM UTC

The second comment on the post:

Of course proportional fonts can be read faster. That's not the point. Programming uses lots of non-standard glyphs, has meaningful syntax (eg. parens, brackets), and often meaningful whitespace. You can real _words_ faster in proportional font, but (arguably) not _code_.

I agree completely.

Re: Programming with proportional fonts is great

#27

Post by DLWormwood » Sat, Jan 16, 2010, 3:30 PM UTC

In my experience, proportional typefaces only work for code if the IDE/editor is using a pretty-printer that uses word-processor style indentation. (That is, it uses tab stops as opposed to just inserting spaces/tabs in the text.)

The only IDEs I've seen work this way was the old THINK Pascal from the 68k Mac era, and its predecessor Instant Pascal for the Apple II. Anybody else seen a more recent example in the wild?

Re: Programming with proportional fonts is great

#28

Post by wwalker3 » Sat, Jan 16, 2010, 3:53 PM UTC

DLWormwood wrote: post #27

In my experience, proportional typefaces only work for code if the IDE/editor is using a pretty-printer that uses word-processor style indentation. (That is, it uses tab stops as opposed to just inserting spaces/tabs in the text.) The only IDEs I've seen work this way was the old THINK Pascal from the 68k Mac era, and its predecessor Instant Pascal for the Apple II. Anybody else seen a more recent example in the wild…

That brings back memories. I used THINK Pascal back in the late '80s in an undergrad computer graphics class, and it did take a little while to get used to proportional fonts. But once I got the hang of indenting with tabs instead of spaces, it was actually kind of nice. As the article says, the text was much easier to read, especially the comments.

EDIT: I checked my dev environments, and it turns out both Eclipse and Visual Studio support proportional fonts in the code editors. I had just never thought to look.

Re: Programming with proportional fonts is great

#29

Post by fr0sty » Sat, Jan 16, 2010, 3:54 PM UTC

    Tomato  vs. Tomahto
    Bug     vs. Feature
    Tabs    vs.  Spaces

Either approach introduces about as many problems as it solves. I personally like being able to line things up with a few extra spaces to give some hints to my future self regarding the structure of my code.

Re: Programming with proportional fonts is great

#30

Post by igrekel » Sat, Jan 16, 2010, 3:55 PM UTC

Or how about a font with proportions made for code?

I would imagine special proportions for markers like (){}[] and punctuation marks and fixed proportions for numbers. At one point the difference between that and syntax highlighting and automatic indentation blurs.