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Monaspace

monaspace.githubnext.com

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Re: Monaspace

#201

Post by Terretta »

pie_flavor wrote: post #40

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).

Curiously for an example home page, the linked site's example ...

    // What if tentative ideas looked handwritten?
    
    /**
     * What if docstrings looked authoritative?
     */
... misaligning the two ** in /** is awkward.

Re: Monaspace

#202

Post by matj1 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #123
zokier wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many people here are now praising texture healing, but to me its just half-way measure. Why are we as a community so resistant for adopting variable-width fonts? This texture healing already breaks perfect character cell grid, so in some ways it feels like worst of both worlds. I feel at least partially the same about fancy ligatures; we could just use the actual characters in source code, Unicode is widely suppor…

It only breaks the grid visually (and not by much); for layout purposes, which is what you depend on, the grid is still intact. Why do we keep using fixed-width fonts? Because a lot of stuff has been written that depends on a columnar grid. Most notably, terminals are absolutely predicated on it and fundamentally cannot support any other mode of operation. To begin with: visual alignment, ASCII art, diagrams using bo…

I agree with that many present tools expect character grid, but moving away from character grid would be not as much work as it seems IMO.

Code can be aligned with elastic tabstops ( https://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/ ) or virtual formatting (that things are aligned according to syntax regardless of whitespace).

Things to align in terminals are mostly tables, and they could be rendered as tables if the terminal supporting that knew that they are tables. Nushell natively supports tabular data structures, so rendering them as proper tables would need just one change – the table renderer.

Re: Monaspace

#203

Post by matj1 »

zokier wrote: post #162
camgunz wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To build on to sibling chrismorgan's excellent post, fixed-width fonts/ASCII art/Unicode drawing are a really elegant way to get 80% of what you'd ever want. Getting to 100% involves a full-on rendering system and markup which is 10x the work and complexity. To date, most people don't want that in their editor.

Yet the most popular editor is vscode which is browser based and has all the rendering tech just sitting there, largely unused.

I got an answer to a similar problem that VSCode needs working cursors out of the view where the text is not rendered. That is why it relies on the text grid for all layout and movement. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/142738#issuecomme...

Re: Monaspace

#204

Post by jamesgeck0 »

djha-skin wrote: post #86

Unfortunately a brilliant and predictable play by Microsoft following its established "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" doctrine. This beautiful feature is created by the GitHub team and is only available on VS Code, strengthening its lead over the other editors. This fact has led me to look more closely at Commit Mono, suggested by nvartolomei in his comment (this article). I love the texture healing idea, and that font…

Using multiple fonts isn't available in VS Code right now, not without doing something hacky with 3rd party custom CSS plugin. It isn't available anywhere without doing something hacky (setting different fonts for italic and bold in the terminal, for example).

Re: Monaspace

#206

Post by solardev »

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.

This is really cool!
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