Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dev Fonts

devfonts.gafi.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 342 posts

Re: Dev Fonts

#141

Post by bussierem »

b0rsuk wrote: post #120

I 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…

I have to agree with my sibling commenter -- you are taking a pretty strange and rather aggressive stance on this, and throwing out some ad-hominems within that.

Multi-select: Useful if I want to do a find-replace, but only within certain select results for the "find" part. If I know where they are I can use Cmd+D or multi-select to just find those quick rather than crafting a nice regex find-replace query with "only in selection" etc.

Ligatures: It's SUBJECTIVE. I dunno why you're throwing out ad hominems like "only for frontend developers who like ". I am looking at code for 8-12 hours a day. If ligatures make the code nice to look at, why the heck do you care what my code looks like? My ligatures aren't being pushed into your environment.

This is like judging someone as "lesser" than you because they like a different mouse because it's comfortable for them...

Re: Dev Fonts

#142

Post by Niccizero »

Nice website but the problem is that it shows the fonts at 18px size when most people use their editors at 11 or 10px sizes. Many fonts look radically different at such small sizes.

Re: Dev Fonts

#143

Post by buckminster »

SamBam wrote: post #130
buckminster wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? So it's not monospaced? I'm having trouble imagining any monospaced font doing this. (The ligatures in fonts such as Fira Code take up the same amount of space as the non-ligatured versions.)

I can't imagine why anyone would do this either. I suppose one possibility is that some software in their web stack is converting fi to an explicit fi ligature and the monospaced font chosen by the web page doesn't support it so the browser does a substitution. When I spot another one I'll have to dig more deeply.

Re: Dev Fonts

#144

Post by folkrav »

b0rsuk wrote: post #132
ffreire wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a curious position to take given that it's mostly a personal choice. People will like what they like, and that's perfectly fine! No need to denigrate frontend devs, or anyone, for a stylistic choice.

I'm fine with people having aesthetic choices. I find front-end developers and their fashions mildly annoying. I think this post would fit very well at /r/unixporn, similar to ASCII art, pixellated graphics or low poly models.

This is quite literally nothing but a website letting you preview how fonts look. What's "r/unixporn" about that? What a bunch of condescending baloney.

Re: Dev Fonts

#145

Post by tobr »

martincmartin wrote: post #139

Am I the only one who uses a proportional font for coding? I find it more readable for the same reason it's more readable in books and other printed media.

Whenever I come across a list like this I hope to find some useful new proportional coding typeface. Nope, not this time either, 100% monospaced. I guess I’ll stick with Input Sans.

Re: Dev Fonts

#146

Post by Chris_Newton »

ldjb wrote: post #15
uallo wrote: post #5

More 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?

I suppose some might say the code looks cleaner with ligatures and they better convey the meaning of the code (e.g. ≠ is easier to understand than !=). Personally, however, I like to see exactly what it is I am typing, exactly which symbols are being used. Ligatures distort that. Ligatures are fine when reading prose, but I find them too confusing when coding. That's a personal preference, though. I'm sure some peopl…

Personally, however, I like to see exactly what it is I am typing, exactly which symbols are being used. Ligatures distort that.

I feel the same way.

I do think I would enjoy programming in a language that used a slightly more extended set of real characters, as long as we had solid editor and font support so typing and viewing them wasn’t going to be an issue for anyone. For example, I’d like to finally have ≠, ≤ and ≥ lining up neatly with =, in my code! I could imagine a few other carefully chosen and easily recognisable symbols, such as ∈ and true arrows, being helpful for readability as well.

But the world speaks in Unicode these days, so assuming there was adequate tool and font support, I think writing these characters for real would be much better than relying on ligatures. Even where ligatures are supported, they tend to use awkwardly wide glyphs to replace multi-character combinations so they don’t break alignment in a monospace font, and sometimes the fonts with programming ligatures seem to join certain combinations in bizarre ways just because they can, even when there’s no apparent need for it.

Re: Dev Fonts

#147

Post by jdmichal »

ossopite wrote: post #102

I 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.

> That's the font you are reading this comment in, in fact.

Wrong. One of my favorite features of Firefox is that I get to choose whether websites can override my fonts. And they can't. Serifed Georgia is default, Ariel if they request sans-serif, and Consolas for monospace.

Re: Dev Fonts

#148

Post by folkrav »

minitech wrote: post #129
b0rsuk wrote: post #120

I 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…

> If you think they do, I'd rather change syntax highlighting to recognize !== and others as a single token . 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. Multise…

Some HN users love to look down on front-end development as if it's some sub-par category of developers, for some reason.

Let's do the same kind of pretentious generalization - I'd wager they are the same who think any language of higher level of abstraction than than C++ is an utter waste of time.

Edit: did I hit a nerve? I don't even believe that second statement, but it's a good example of how pretentious that comment sounded.

Re: Dev Fonts

#149

Post by jhvkjhk »

Those "Dev Fonts" suck because they are monospace, but English letter is proportional. The inconsistent letter-space of monospace fonts really drive me mad. Now I use Input Serif, it's not a perfect programming font, but it makes my code more readable than any monospace "Dev Font".

Re: Dev Fonts

#150

Post by Finnucane »

b0rsuk wrote: post #120

I 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…

Ligatures were created to prevent crashes of overlapping bits of characters. But this is an issue that shouldn't really occur in a monospace font.
Post reply on HN