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Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

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Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#131

Post by tacker2000 »

eviks wrote: post #128
globular-toast wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I don't have a button that corresponds to "unicode arrow" and I don't particularly want one. I have only 10 digits and they're all accounted for with ubiquitous, regular keyboards that have been around for decades. Having to use some app that converts two characters inserted in sequence into the correct character is a terrible idea. It makes me think of the Dvorak trend among geeks. I very nearly learnt Dvorak my…

> But I don't have a button that corresponds to "unicode arrow" You mean the label: well, take out your favorite marker and draw one on the side! But also, you don't have labels that correspond to these standard Mac layout symbols https://i.sstatic.net/ht0Tg.png So? Should it be removed? > ubiquitous, regular keyboards that have been around for decades. All poorly designed, most even acknowledge that by adding an ext…

Yes the keyboard layouts we have nowadays are actually suboptimal for touch typing, but nobody has ever managed to change them on a global scale.

So why would one change the keyboard layouts just because somebody needs an arrow for programming? This is such a niche use case that it will never happen.

Also many programmers will not want to use the unicode arrow instead of ->, thats a personal choice and nothing else.

It would also be fatal to retrofit old languages like this since it would just create confusion for little benefit.

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#132

Post by msephton »

tmtvl wrote: post #42

Looks pretty good, but I often need to read Japanese characters so I'm gonna stick to IBM Plex, which has both Monospace and CJK variants.

IBM Plex Mono has been my choice for years. I'm always open-minded regarding change and every time I hear of new fonts I do a comparison, but there's always something annoying in the new font that IBM Plex Mono does right. Still, I'm looking forward to doing the comparisons of the new fonts in hearing about on this post.

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#133

Post by 1718627440 »

kid64 wrote: post #86
1718627440 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter example, I always decrease the font-size everywhere. The annoying trend of bloating everything with whitespace, means that less and less stuff fits on the screen. But even HN is on 80% right now.

Ah, to be young.

And just not having an ultra super-wide extra large screen.

Peers of my age also can't stand looking at my screen contents, so maybe it's also because I have bad eye-sight and am used to infer letters from general shapes and context.

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#134

Post by eviks »

tacker2000 wrote: post #131
eviks wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I don't have a button that corresponds to "unicode arrow" You mean the label: well, take out your favorite marker and draw one on the side! But also, you don't have labels that correspond to these standard Mac layout symbols https://i.sstatic.net/ht0Tg.png So? Should it be removed? > ubiquitous, regular keyboards that have been around for decades. All poorly designed, most even acknowledge that by adding an ext…

Yes the keyboard layouts we have nowadays are actually suboptimal for touch typing, but nobody has ever managed to change them on a global scale. So why would one change the keyboard layouts just because somebody needs an arrow for programming? This is such a niche use case that it will never happen. Also many programmers will not want to use the unicode arrow instead of ->, thats a personal choice and nothing else.…

> This is such a niche use case that it will never happen.

How do you square this with the simple fact that it has already happened? And just as simple of a forecast: it will continue to happen.

> Also many programmers will not want to use the unicode arrow instead of ->, thats a personal choice and nothing else.

So what? Other programmers will.

But I don't get your general point - are you saying that the only change worth doing is the one that has happened globally in the past? Like, currently some popular languages support "unicode letter" for identifiers, which means it includes various nonsense like dead languages from thousands of years ago (but doesn't include much more used stuff just because the designers outsourced all their thinking to some Unicode Annex). Do you want to remove all that for consistenty with the fact that no one will ever use those symbols in function names?

> It would also be fatal to retrofit old languages like this since it would just create confusion for little benefit.

Could you link to the death certificate of the old language called C since this compiles despite no one having 𓀄𓀂 in their keyboard layout

    #include 
    int main() {
      int var𓀄𓀂 = 2;
      printf("%d\n", var𓀄𓀂 );
      return 0;
    }
Are you confused to death?

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#136

Post by rbanffy »

o11c wrote: post #45

This, like many fonts, fails to handle vertical arrows: | ^ v | Note that the raised appearance of `^` exists for compatibility with typewriters that use the backspace key to use it as a circumflex accent over lowercase letters. This is doubly obsolete today (we have real combined characters and can use them on uppercase). This is one of those cases where the name originally used for the character in various standard…

Those symbols were never intended to be used as arrows. Every modern programming language today can use Unicode at least in comments, and there are extensive groups of characters for box and arrow drawings.

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#137

Post by IshKebab »

sayyadirfanali wrote: post #109
eviks wrote: post #105

> Are you frustrated that -> looks nothing like an arrow The proper solution is, of course, to allow ←arrows→ (and, naturally, not trying to fit a variable peg into a monowidth whole)... maybe in the next generation of languages when the bottom level of typesetting quality is raised a bit

i have addressed this in one of the other comments. it is impossible to achieve both elegance (good look) and consistency (monospace width) in these cases. many folks, like yourself, are pioneering full Unicode editing. we, on the other end, are just trying to make editing without ligatures elegant because ASCII, i believe, would remain predominant for a long time to come.

I kind of think monospacing is overrated in programming. Sroustrup typeset the entire of The C++ Programming Language in variable width font and it looks totally fine. I've used variable width fonts in my editor a fair bit too.

I think the main problem with it is you need to use tabs for indentation and unfortunately spaces comprehensively won that battle. IMO that's because although tabs are clearly better, spaces are definitely more idiot-friendly and there are a lot of idiots in the world - or at least people who don't give a shit about nice formatting. So large tab based codebases tended to end up with a horrible mix of tabs and spaces.

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#138

Post by stOneskull »

rbanffy wrote: post #135

I love when people make their own fonts (I make one myself), but I wish they had more unique personalities. These days it’s hard to tell one programming font from another.

i'd like one with more extreme braces. a lot of the time, my old eyes find it hard to tell them apart from parentheses. i like OP's font but braces are looking like brackets now.

Re: Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

#139

Post by rbanffy »

sayyadirfanali wrote: post #4
MarsIronPI wrote: post #2

Not trying to be negative, just confused: I don't really see how this font is "designed for symbol-heavy languages". The symbols look normal to me. Maybe the letters are a little more spaced? I'd love to be enlightened.

designer here. by symbol-heavy languages i mean languages like Perl and Haskell which make heavy use of symbols (sigils in Perl and operators in Haskell). Myna was designed after my frustration with other monospace fonts combined with my (self-imposed) inability to use ligatures.

Where does the design for the text characters come from? Is it based on a mono font you find readable?
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