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MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

monolisa.dev

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Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#131

Post by taeric »

zestyping wrote: post #125

Please stop it with the "coding ligatures" already. They are not helpful and only serve to obscure the code being written. This has got to be one of my least favourite trends in programming aesthetics these days. For a font claiming to "follow function" to devote so much effort to sacrificing function for the _vogue du jour_ is especially rich.

I mean... The existence of ligatures is almost by definition strictly aesthetic. And on that measure, it either brings you a smile to notice that f and i, for example, are joined; or you didn't even notice it.

That is, I won't claim they help readability. But they do make me smile, and don't seem to hurt. (I'm assuming they disappear on copy operations. Mac OS' habit of replacing -- with a longer dash is painful when sending cli arguments.)

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#132

Post by jupp0r »

rbanffy wrote: post #118
kbd wrote: post #24

Unfortunately not available to compare on https://www.programmingfonts.org/ While I'm here: Victor Mono has been my programming font of choice for a while now: https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/ Oh, look at that, the Victor Mono homepage has a font comparison slider that allows you to compare it to MonoLisa! MonoLisa advertises that it's wider than other monospace fonts, and you can really see that in the compariso…

I don't know why anyone would even bother to even go beyond the first item on the list. Such beauty, such elegant geometry, such timeless classic lines. Truly an elegant font for a more civilized time. https://www.programmingfonts.org/#font3270 BTW, I'm also a huge fan of Luxi Mono, but I edit it and add a dot in the middle of the zero to make it different from the O. I like it because it reminds me a bit of the Sun…

I really don't like it, but thanks for sharing it anyway (and creating it in the first place I guess).

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#133

Post by agrippanux »

speedgoose wrote: post #15

Since we are talking about our favourite coding fonts, my personal choice is on Comic Code. I find it very easy to read and better than the other mono comic sans fonts. https://tosche.net/fonts/comic-code

Cascadia Code (free, from Microsoft) is surprisingly good. There is a clone of it on NerdFonts that adds more ligatures if that’s your jam.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#135

Post by bostonsre »

> MonoLisa uses open forms and terminals (starting and ending points) that are pointing towards the neighboring letters to let the eye follow the line of text fluently.

Does the lowercase g follow that convention? It seems to make me almost stumble while reading and do a double take on what the letter is. But maybe it's just because I'm new to the font.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#136

Post by chipotle_coyote »

munch117 wrote: post #129
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they're absolutely right. But it begs the first-principals question-- why code using a monospace font? Today, every major editor that isn't terminal-based supports proportional width fonts beautifully. There was a whole "coding font" family designed around the idea that we should be using proportional fonts for this, and it makes a great case... https://input.djr.com/info/ ...except that just about every time I…

You may be right on the main point, but I have a quarrel with one of your arguments. > Put that in a non-proportional font, and the asterisks on the first line probably won't line up with the rest. So lose the redundant asterisks. They serve no purpose. They make the comment both harder to read and harder to write.

That's a "DocBlock", in this case for PHP, although it comes from JavaDoc and I suspect there are some other languages using the same format. It's a standard convention that API documentation can be automatically generated from, and in many editors the comment block itself can be at least partially automatically generated. (e.g., in Visual Code, if I just type "/*" on a line before a function header and hit TAB, the editor's going to fill in a lot of those details.)

At any rate, while you might be technically correct, in practice, "PHP and Java coders should abandon this long-held convention used by hundreds of thousands of programmers and decades' worth of tooling in order to avoid unsightly alignment issues when using proportional fonts in editors" may be a hard sell. :)

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#137

Post by bostonsre »

zestyping wrote: post #125

Please stop it with the "coding ligatures" already. They are not helpful and only serve to obscure the code being written. This has got to be one of my least favourite trends in programming aesthetics these days. For a font claiming to "follow function" to devote so much effort to sacrificing function for the _vogue du jour_ is especially rich.

Lucky for you, you can disable ligatures or not use a font that you don't like.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#138

Post by itslennysfault »

kbd wrote: post #24

Unfortunately not available to compare on https://www.programmingfonts.org/ While I'm here: Victor Mono has been my programming font of choice for a while now: https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/ Oh, look at that, the Victor Mono homepage has a font comparison slider that allows you to compare it to MonoLisa! MonoLisa advertises that it's wider than other monospace fonts, and you can really see that in the compariso…

ooooo thanks for the recommendation. MonoLisa is pretty, but not $70 pretty. Especially when this is just as good (maybe better?) and I can just toss the author whatever I want.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#140

Post by amake »

zestyping wrote: post #125

Please stop it with the "coding ligatures" already. They are not helpful and only serve to obscure the code being written. This has got to be one of my least favourite trends in programming aesthetics these days. For a font claiming to "follow function" to devote so much effort to sacrificing function for the _vogue du jour_ is especially rich.

Please stop it with the diatribes about ligatures.

If you don't like them, don't use them. It's that simple.

Other people do like them, and will continue to use and enjoy them.

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