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JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

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Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#181

Post by necovek »

Pxtl wrote: post #151
boutad wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, many fonts use double story 'a' for roman and single story 'ɑ' for italic. Calibri, Segoe UI, Times New Roman, Droid Serif, Merriweather, Consolas, and Source Sans Pro are examples I found from quick searching.

... wow, how did I get this far in life without noticing that. a a a a. Edit: Apparently Verdana doesn't seem to do that.

Many fonts having "real italics" would use a different shape, whereas those with only "slanted fonts" would not (like Verdana). It's only a rough rule, but you can assume that most serif fonts will use "real italics".

Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#182

Post by necovek »

boutad wrote: post #149
lokedhs wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd much rather see languages take advantage of characters outside of ASCII. There are already symbols such as ⇒ which could be used by a language. This is a nice feature of APL, and the derivatives such as J which use plain ASCII are much less nice to work with.

That seems like it would be difficult to type.

What's stopping editors to provide shortcuts akin to ligatures? Eg. typing "=>" would make use of the "follows" sign.

Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#183

Post by phuonghuynhnet »

ebg13 wrote: post #6
nkrisc wrote: post #2

I was disappointed that despite presenting the cookie banner as if it were a terminal, the options did not accept keyboard input [Y]es, I agree [N]o, thanks Ok on topic: I'm never sure what to think of these "developer" fonts that make use of ligatures for combinations like ==, >=, ->, =>, etc. On one hand they do look really nice, but I always can't help but feel it would actually make things just a little bit harde…

Same. Any font that claims to be for programming but includes ligatures gets a "no thanks" from me accompanied by a bit of sadness because they often mar otherwise nicely designed typefaces.

As I know, VSCode, Iterm2, Jetbrains IDEs have ligatures option that we can turn on/off easily.

Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#184

Post by ygra »

necovek wrote: post #181
Pxtl wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... wow, how did I get this far in life without noticing that. a a a a. Edit: Apparently Verdana doesn't seem to do that.

Many fonts having "real italics" would use a different shape, whereas those with only "slanted fonts" would not (like Verdana). It's only a rough rule, but you can assume that most serif fonts will use "real italics".

The words you're looking for are italic and oblique :-) One is a different design, the other simply the same letterforms slanted.

Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#186

Post by thiht »

The slide comparison with Consolas might not be a good idea, Consolas looks much easier on the eye, and it happens to be my all-time favorite monospace font.

Some ligatures are also really weird and look like a case of "we could do it so we did it". ===, ~@, #_(, etc. are highly unreadable and unnecesary. Spacing ligatures are great though.

Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#187

Post by Piskvorrr »

lokedhs wrote: post #120
Klathmon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I love how configurable editors are now days. I absolutely adore ligatures in my programming fonts. I've been using FiraCode for at least a year or 2 now, and while i'll be the first to admit that the reason I enabled ligatures was because they looked cool, now I really miss them when they aren't there.

I'd much rather see languages take advantage of characters outside of ASCII. There are already symbols such as ⇒ which could be used by a language. This is a nice feature of APL, and the derivatives such as J which use plain ASCII are much less nice to work with.

That's...a terrible idea. You're now bound to a specific subset of editors that are capable of producing ⇒ (as opposed to the two-character => ), for...for what?

For looking pretty, I assume: that's probably a matter of UI (editor displays arrow character instead of equals+greaterThan), but should not propagate into actual source code.

Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#188

Post by Piskvorrr »

necovek wrote: post #182
boutad wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like it would be difficult to type.

What's stopping editors to provide shortcuts akin to ligatures? Eg. typing "=>" would make use of the "follows" sign.

And now you can only type code in the set of blessed editors and correctly displaying fonts. "Make code pretty" should be a matter of presentation, not actual source code.

To use your example, typing "=>" could display the "follows" sign, but the string representation should not depend on exotic characters like "ř", "⸙", or "" (is that a box symbol, or "symbol not found in current font"? Oh wait, the HTML input field ate it! See?!).

Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#189

Post by myfonj »

I'm quite surprised no serious "programming font" to this days didn't come with something improving camelCase readability: making ligature for each lowerUPPER combination with slightly wider center gap and narrower first character (so that sum was still in monospace grid) would FMPoW tremendously boost readability and would be remedy for camelCase haters.

I've searched for it lately and the only what resembled this was interesting POC of "mixed" (semi-proportional monospaced) font [1], but with simple kerning pairs, not ligatures, but with extra trickery for "uppercase prefixes" (`_UUUl... `→`_UU·Ul...`). I wonder if in-word camelcase boundaries would be doable as well, so that `decodeURIComponent` would be rendered as `decode·URI·Component`.

[1] https://twitter.com/Tricertops/status/951551714078941185

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