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MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

monolisa.dev

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Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#261

Post by ryanbrunner »

tech2 wrote: post #245

Perhaps I'm missing why this is desired for fonts in general, but my tendency when selecting one for editing code is to use one with a smaller vertical line spacing to minimise spacing between lines (and therefore fit more lines on screen). Why do people appear to prefer the opposite (massive distance between lines)? I'm currently using Input Mono, not because I like it specifically as a font, but because it's relati…

Navigation tools in code editors are generally good enough that I'll sacrifice information density for readability (i.e. I can get where I want to go fairly easily, so it's not really essential that it's on screen). Also the methods in the codebase I'm working in are nearly always < 10 lines long, so the 'unit' of code I need to see at once comfortably fits no matter how much vertical space is used.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#262

Post by ryanbrunner »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #220
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…

FWIW, Verdana aligns those asterisks just fine. I do think deleting those asterisks makes documentation better and I personally write documentation without asterisks. Why they are there at all? It's just noise.

It's a documentation standard that is used by various tools, if you're utilizing those tools you don't really have an option.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#263

Post by ryanbrunner »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #221
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sacrificing legibility of code for a flawed tradition is a wrong tradeoff.

Less a tradition and more of a standard. It's more or less complaining that the way HTML escapes is ugly so you're going to substitute your own variant. There's nothing technically stopping you, but if you want your code to be parseable by web browsers you unfortunately need to adhere to standards.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#264

Post by k_sze »

blindmute wrote: post #178
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.

A ligature is more functional than not using one. They obscure the code for about 5 seconds the first time you see them, and then never again. After those 5 seconds, you register a new semantic symbol in the brain. It is objectively easier for your brain to parse a single arrow symbol than it is to parse => in a monospace font. For the latter, you are scanning two symbols and only after seeing them both can your brai…

Is ligature rendering context-sensitive? If I put => in a string literal in JavaScript/TypeScript and the IDE "helpfully" decides to apply ligature to it, I'm gonna go insane.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#265

Post by iCarrot »

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…

Have been using Victor Mono for a year now, that Victor Mono demo on programmingfonts.org definitely does not look like what I'm used to. Looks like the medium weighted Victor Mono.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#266

Post by tech2 »

fdewnijfwg wrote: post #247
tech2 wrote: post #245

Perhaps I'm missing why this is desired for fonts in general, but my tendency when selecting one for editing code is to use one with a smaller vertical line spacing to minimise spacing between lines (and therefore fit more lines on screen). Why do people appear to prefer the opposite (massive distance between lines)? I'm currently using Input Mono, not because I like it specifically as a font, but because it's relati…

> Why do people appear to prefer the opposite (massive distance between lines)? Readability. Having text crammed into as little space as possible is efficient, but many people have problem reading it.

Sure, I guess my question is around why people would consider a line in a sea of space more legible than the same x-height font with less space below it.

I guess I could have an unusual take on this, but I find a lot of mono fonts seem to have massive inter-line spacing. So much so that their appearance is almost jarring to me. I find it disruptive to read. If I had issues with the legibility of a font then I'd increase its size, not the spacing between lines.

As mentioned earlier though, I guess I'm an odd-one-out here, I'm seeking to understand how/why my view here is unusual.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#267

Post by dsr_ »

taeric wrote: post #182
dsr_ wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a third option: "What is that?" When I'm reading fiction, I generally don't mind ligatures. I find them oppressively obscurantist in any situation where I want to know clearly and distinctly what each character is -- i.e. code and science/math/engineering.

I'd wager that the vast majority of the time, you just don't notice them. About the only time they are easily visible is in large type, when they really shouldn't be used. It's kind of like right justified text. Done well, it shouldn't be noticed how it was done.

Please don't tell me what I do and don't see when I just told you what I see and how I feel about it.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#268

Post by spoiler »

alexvoda wrote: post #181
Aeolun wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In JetBrain products: Preferences -> Editor -> Font -> Enable ligatures So you can turn them off even in fonts that have them, but most fonts have separate versions with and without anyway.

For VS Code see (1) and to selectively disable them (2). For Atom see (3). There does not appear to be a way to disable them in Visual Studio. (1) https://stacksjar.com/post/use-of-font-ligatures-in-vs-code (2) https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Coenraad... (3) https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/issues/633

Ooh the selectively disabled extension is really cool! Thanks!

I sometimes—rarely happens thought—dislike how the cursor renders on top of ligatures in vscode. Always wished it would allow me to "inject" the cursor into the ligature, but since it didn't happen often or bother me as much, I never tried looking for a solution. This will be a small, but much appreciated quality of life improvement! Thanks again!

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#269

Post by prmoustache »

EastSmith wrote: post #151
bostonsre wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How about whoever wants them to enable them?

You are taking this backwards.

- there are more fonts without ligatures than there are fonts with ligatures. - every single OS I can think of include by default a monospace font that do not support ligatures. - there are still a huge amount of terminals which do not support them. - for almost any font that has ligature there is a variant without ligature - there is virtually no way to end up with ligatures without actively looking to get ligatures. - any terminal/editor that supports ligature has a setting for that. - most people do actually like ligatures which is the reason they use those editors/terminal/fonts and want those activated by default.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#270

Post by askonomm »

xgme wrote: post #36
chrisseaton wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems niche? I don't think that's enough of a reason to say the design choice is a sin for everyone.

Line length linters are kinda standard. The goal is to have "shorter lines".

Line length doesn't change just because the font itself is wider.
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