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Monaspace

monaspace.githubnext.com

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Re: Monaspace

#31

Post by TheCondor »

bsder wrote: post #25

Can we please stop with abusing ligatures for things like != into ≠? If you want APL, please use APL and leave the rest of us alone. != is two bloody characters not one . And now people are doing it for 3 characters. With this kind of thing, you get all the text editing idiocy of combining characters (like emojis) for no benefit at all. See: Text Editing Hates You Too https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/

I have a proposal here...

Jetbrains, VSCode people, whomever: edit mode and presentation view. There are times when I think for a lot of people the traditional math style makes sense for reading, but when it comes to editing, it bothers the hell out of me too.

Re: Monaspace

#32

Post by spartanatreyu »

idle_zealot wrote: post #26
bsder wrote: post #25

Can we please stop with abusing ligatures for things like != into ≠? If you want APL, please use APL and leave the rest of us alone. != is two bloody characters not one . And now people are doing it for 3 characters. With this kind of thing, you get all the text editing idiocy of combining characters (like emojis) for no benefit at all. See: Text Editing Hates You Too https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/

Fortunately for you the ligatures are optional and have no impact on the underlying text. To be "left alone" you have to do exactly nothing.

> To be "left alone" you have to do exactly nothing.

Unfortunately that's not true.

The problem shows itself when looking at codeblocks that developers share (in docs, blogs, videos, etc...)

Ligatures become a readability problem.

Re: Monaspace

#33

Post by pie_flavor »

bsder wrote: post #25

Can we please stop with abusing ligatures for things like != into ≠? If you want APL, please use APL and leave the rest of us alone. != is two bloody characters not one . And now people are doing it for 3 characters. With this kind of thing, you get all the text editing idiocy of combining characters (like emojis) for no benefit at all. See: Text Editing Hates You Too https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/

Well, what if instead of wanting APL (an array-based programming language that really has nothing in common semantically with the one I use day-to-day), I just want things that are conceptually one symbol to actually look like one symbol? After all, you do not have to use my computer which has them enabled, and you do not have to enable them to use fonts that include them. This is straightforwardly 'other people should stop having preferences': No, thank you.

Re: Monaspace

#34

Post by Daneel_ »

nvartolomei wrote: post #18
turnsout wrote: post #4

The "Texture Healing" feature is a really smart use of OpenType features to make problematic monospace combinations look much better without breaking the grid at all. One naive way to do this would be to create ligature pairs for difficult pairs (mi, lm, etc). But instead, they seem to be selecting character alternates that fill the fixed width differently based on their surroundings.

Commit Mono font does something similar and calls it “Smart kerning”. Visit https://commitmono.com/ and click on the “04 Intelligent” tab for details. In practice this is unusable. Because the width of the letters now depends on the succeeding character, the text jumps as you write it. Super annoying. Cool for reading. Awful for writing.

Exactly my experience as well.

Re: Monaspace

#35

Post by csande17 »

TheCondor wrote: post #31
bsder wrote: post #25

Can we please stop with abusing ligatures for things like != into ≠? If you want APL, please use APL and leave the rest of us alone. != is two bloody characters not one . And now people are doing it for 3 characters. With this kind of thing, you get all the text editing idiocy of combining characters (like emojis) for no benefit at all. See: Text Editing Hates You Too https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/

I have a proposal here... Jetbrains, VSCode people, whomever: edit mode and presentation view. There are times when I think for a lot of people the traditional math style makes sense for reading, but when it comes to editing, it bothers the hell out of me too.

IntelliJ IDEA has this feature: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/reader-mode.html

In addition to ligatures, you get IMO a better version of the "Mix & Match" idea: doc comments are rendered as normal proportional text.

Re: Monaspace

#36

Post by Kiuhrly1 »

Wow, these are pretty nice, with a permissive license too by the looks of things. I like the serif one in particular, very readable to me.

Re: Monaspace

#37

Post by pie_flavor »

redder23 wrote: post #23

I really hate most of these fontLigatures. They just confuse me, many of the character combination I never even used in the languages I code in. And others look so different that I would be afraid to not know what they actually are. Some seem useful but is seems I can not pick them individually and have to commit to an entire group of them. The symbol for (something I never used anyway) looks like the absolute worst…

Some other fonts use character variants for this, so you can personalize your own setup. For example, with Fira Code[0], if you want to tell VS Code to not use the long = for == but still space it in a less ugly way, instead of setting ligatures to true, you set it to "'ss08'", which will then do the same thing to === and != and !==. This is also where they can hide their 'overthinking' glyphs, so the discerning user can enable them but they won't disrupt you if you just install the font normally. For example I have ss06, ss07, and cv27 enabled, for distinct escaping backslashes, =~ and !~ operators, and smooth-square [].

[0]: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

Re: Monaspace

#38

Post by ly »

csande17 wrote: post #13

I'm curious what people think of the "Mix & Match" examples. Radon (the handwriting one) seems to complement the other fonts well because it's basically an italic. But all the others are so similar, with their identical metrics and whatnot, that the "authoritative docstrings" and "Copilot voice" examples are really hard to distinguish.

The mix and match is what convinced me to give this font a try. I’ve been using Operator Mono for years now specifically because of it’s true italics.

I’ve wanted to switch to an open alternative to Operator Mono for a long time now, and I think because of the mix and match, this finally is the one.

Re: Monaspace

#39

Post by threePointFive »

dpc_01234 wrote: post #5

I was initially thinking ... "OK, another monospace font (family), look nice", until I got to "texture healing" which really made me want to try it out. I really like the idea of using different style of font for different things, but as primarily terminal user, I don't even know which terminals support it (if any), and then we would need CLI text editors support as well. But I think it's a great idea.

Theoretically, anything based on xterm should have the capability for it. ESC[m is the escape sequence to pick font 0-9. In practice though, is a different question. I use Alacritty, but I cannot find if this is supported and trying to do it myself isn't getting any results.

Re: Monaspace

#40

Post by pie_flavor »

This is a hearty number of ligatures, and yet it is still not enough for me. Now that != and would be my favorite - if the crossbar of the lowercase t was not so far below the height of e.g. the lowercase c. So I think I'm still sticking with Fira Code for now (but will certainly be checking back in a year to see what they've changed with user feedback).
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