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Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

blakewatson.com

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Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#41

Post by bsimpson »

blakewatson wrote: post #24
bsimpson wrote: post #21

Isn't the whole point of monospaced fonts columnar alignment (e.g. the table in the article)? Seems like "almost" defeats the point. Then again, I don't see values lined up much these days: { "someKey": "someValue", "someOtherKey:" "someOtherValue, and if you only care about leading whitespace (that is, the whitespace before a character appears on the line), maybe it doesn't matter how your font is spaced. I suspect…

Yeah, you’re right. You lose columnar alignment but beginning indentation still aligns and, in Input Sans, I believe the numbers are tabular. David Jonathan Ross makes this argument in the explainer for Input: > Sometimes programmers rely on the monospaced grid to create a second column of values or comments on the right side of the page. It’s true, these secondary columns won’t align in a proportionally spaced font.…

I still can't believe personalization isn't more widespread in coding. For instance, it ought to be reasonably trivial to set up your formatting preferences in your editor, but have the file saved to disk be in a common format.

You want 8-space tabs and braces on their own lines? Cool. We'll save the file with all the formatting defaults, but run a formatter tuned to your preferences before displaying.

Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#42

Post by quesera »

c-smile wrote: post #14

For some reasons, I've found that good, old, Verdana (as used on this very HN) is the most editor/writer friendly. IMHO of course.

> Verdana (as used on this very HN)

Hm. If Verdana is the render font for you here on HN, I believe that's that's all about your browser config, and nothing about HN.

Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#43

Post by every »

shagie wrote: post #29
every wrote: post #26

I prefer Source Code Pro for the terminal: https://adobe-fonts.github.io/source-code-pro/

Source Code Pro was my go to for a long time ( https://blog.typekit.com/2012/09/24/source-code-pro/ gets into the design of it) - the 1Il|iO0oB8 set is where its most interesting to me (and why I liked it). However, when Jetbrains Mono came out, I switched my code editors to it (IntelliJ was trivial) - https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ (and no, I don't like ligatures). The slightly larger lowercase high at the same…

I enjoy in Source Code Pro that every character is unambiguous...

Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#44

Post by themadturk »

I love writing with monospaced fonts (just as the author of article says, they look "writerly"), but I detest the fonts in iA Writer. I just can't stand to look at them, so I don't use the software (which would be great if it allowed me to choose other fonts). I also hate Courier New, which is a weak and spindly font. My favorite is Courier Prime.

Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#46

Post by adrusi »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #38
joshjb17 wrote: post #30

Two big reasons for continuing to use monospaced fonts in programming: 1) Support for vim navigation, where hjkl move you one character in a direction on an evenly spaced grid. Remove that uniform spacing and up ceases to be “up” 2) Legibility for formatted comments and ASCII art (could argue these should be avoided but I’ve seen some magical ASCII art in code) //////////////// // My Comment // ////////////////

I both use vim movement and a proportional font for coding. 1/ That’s already broken by line wrapping. gj is the command moving up in the grid not j . The fact you are confusing the two should tell you how little of a difference some sideway movement makes. 2/ Don’t use ASCII art in code. It’s annoying for people not using monospaced font and I’m not alone.

Many people map j/k to gj/gk and forget that's not the default behavior.

Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#48

Post by forgetfulness »

carabiner wrote: post #34

Meta: Why is HN obsessed with typography?

Programmers work with text all day. We think of that text we work with as the subject matter very often and that sparks lively debates.

There could also be an element of tradition; prestigious institutions and individuals, like Bell Labs, Donald Knuth and Apple, have devoted significant resources to typesetting and publishing, so an appreciation for typography could be seen as a marker of sophistication from that.

And lastly we must often have some working knowledge of the design of user interfaces at some point in our careers, and you need to have some notions of typography to be effective at that.

Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#49

Post by blakewatson »

themadturk wrote: post #44

I love writing with monospaced fonts (just as the author of article says, they look "writerly"), but I detest the fonts in iA Writer. I just can't stand to look at them, so I don't use the software (which would be great if it allowed me to choose other fonts). I also hate Courier New, which is a weak and spindly font. My favorite is Courier Prime.

Take a look at Drafting* Mono: https://indestructibletype.com/Drafting/

Re: Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

#50

Post by joshjb17 »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #38
joshjb17 wrote: post #30

Two big reasons for continuing to use monospaced fonts in programming: 1) Support for vim navigation, where hjkl move you one character in a direction on an evenly spaced grid. Remove that uniform spacing and up ceases to be “up” 2) Legibility for formatted comments and ASCII art (could argue these should be avoided but I’ve seen some magical ASCII art in code) //////////////// // My Comment // ////////////////

I both use vim movement and a proportional font for coding. 1/ That’s already broken by line wrapping. gj is the command moving up in the grid not j . The fact you are confusing the two should tell you how little of a difference some sideway movement makes. 2/ Don’t use ASCII art in code. It’s annoying for people not using monospaced font and I’m not alone.

Interesting, wasn’t aware of gj. I’ve always worked in code bases where a 120 or less character width is imposed, removing the possibility of line wrapping. TIL, mapping j to gj sounds like a good move.
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