My favourite monospaced font is Triplicate https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html >: the only true serif monospace that I know of (though I have a vague feeling I found one other at some point). Every other serif monospace I know of is a slab serif. Triplicate’s variable stroke thickness is also exceedingly rare in monospaced fonts; almost everyone goes for uniform stroke thickness, as is customary with sans…
“ligatures in programming fonts are a terrible idea” I agree as well with the point about ligatures, but I find funny that the advice comes from a site that thinks straight up normal text with no hover, no distinct color, no distinct font and no underline is a good way to signal linked pages https://i.imgur.com/9iVMfgD.png (who would have guessed Racket was a link?)
Dev Fonts
121–130 of 342 posts
Re: Dev Fonts
#122Re: Dev Fonts
#123More and more often, I see ligatures being used on such fonts. E.g. === or != are combined in a visually single character. Personally, I don't like that at all as I think it makes code less readable. It is probably something that you can get used to. But what exactly is the appeal of it anyway?
Re: Dev Fonts
#124I switched to coding in a proportional font, Verdana, a couple of years ago and never looked back. That's the font you are reading this comment in, in fact. Code is mostly words and words are much easier to read in a proportional font. Symbols are plenty clear enough in Verdana, all letters are distinguishable, and I don't use mid-line alignment so I don't see the point in a monospace font outside of the terminal.
Edit: it feels so wrong! Let’s see if I can get used to it.
Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/lmOR9ze.png
Re: Dev Fonts
#125Re: Dev Fonts
#126My favourite monospaced font is Triplicate https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html >: the only true serif monospace that I know of (though I have a vague feeling I found one other at some point). Every other serif monospace I know of is a slab serif. Triplicate’s variable stroke thickness is also exceedingly rare in monospaced fonts; almost everyone goes for uniform stroke thickness, as is customary with sans…
Re: Dev Fonts
#127Half a year ago, I configured my IDE to use a _duospaced_ font: https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font It mostly retains the advantages of a monospaced font while being a bit easier to read and fitting more characters on screen. I'd love to see more font-designers exploring this idea.
2.4rem for their paragraph font and a 1.75 line-height... How is duospace for programming? Breaking the alignment isn't an issue?
I just set it and forgot.
Now, when I switch back to Fira Code, the first thing I notice is how far apart the letters are.
> Breaking the alignment isn't an issue?
At worst, you're only ever half a character off. Unless I'm explicitly looking for it, I don't notice the offset.
...it might be an issue if there's a limited line-length and you don't have an auto-formatter that will take care of it for you.
...or if you work with tables.
But since I don't have these issues, it just all feels very natural.
Re: Dev Fonts
#128I don't see ligatures solving any important problem. If you think they do, I'd rather change syntax highlighting to recognize !== and others as a single token . It's like multi-select in text editors. When you think about it, it's actually an inferior form of search&replace. Inferior because it interacts badly with off-screen matches. I find arguments of kakoune users unconvincing. My personal opinion is - and I'm fi…
Re: Dev Fonts
#129I don't see ligatures solving any important problem. If you think they do, I'd rather change syntax highlighting to recognize !== and others as a single token . It's like multi-select in text editors. When you think about it, it's actually an inferior form of search&replace. Inferior because it interacts badly with off-screen matches. I find arguments of kakoune users unconvincing. My personal opinion is - and I'm fi…
Your syntax highlighter probably already recognizes single tokens as single tokens.
> It's like multi-select in text editors. When you think about it, it's actually an inferior form of search&replace.
I’m thinking about it, and it isn’t. Sometimes search and replace is an inferior form of multiselect. Multiselect is a less flexible form of macros, but provides immediate feedback.
> My personal opinion is - and I'm fine taking negative karma for this - that ligatures mostly appeal to the front-end developers among us. To the people who abuse the words "beautiful" and "gorgeous", and admire web pages which have a single text column using up 1/3 of screen width.
This is an unpleasant statement and apparently even you recognize that.
Re: Dev Fonts
#130My favourite monospaced font is Triplicate https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html >: the only true serif monospace that I know of (though I have a vague feeling I found one other at some point). Every other serif monospace I know of is a slab serif. Triplicate’s variable stroke thickness is also exceedingly rare in monospaced fonts; almost everyone goes for uniform stroke thickness, as is customary with sans…
I'm not a fan of symbol ligatures but what I really loathe are monospaced fonts with a single character width fi ligature so the f and the i are both half width. I've seen several websites recently using fonts that do this. It is very visually distracting, especially in code samples.
(The ligatures in fonts such as Fira Code take up the same amount of space as the non-ligatured versions.)