JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

Post by necovek » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 8:39 AM UTC

Piskvorrr wrote: post #197

necovek wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, I agree with the principle: presentation and source code are not tied together. But we've been constrained to ASCII for programming for far too long. Sure, there are benefits, but is there a way forward? How can we know if we don't explore it. Most development IDEs are configurable and extendable in such a way. Or well, at least the one I am using is (Emacs). Just like opinionated languages have not had t…

Sure, it's possible , with major compat breaks. What I'm asking is this: what is the (commensurate) benefit from this change? I just don't see "looks prettier by default" as a strong enough reason - what am I missing?

Post by necovek » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 12:38 PM UTC

Piskvorrr wrote: post #202

necovek wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unicode and its transformation formats (UTF-8, -16) were major "compat breaks", and to be honest, still are. We did not push for them for the emojis, but for the ability to be more precise and more expressive. Mathematics has developed a very large alphabet for the very same reasons, and if it was constrained to ASCII, we'd be learning integrals today in the "Newtonian way". If you don't see those properties as offer…

Quite the contrary, UTF-8 is backward compatible to ASCII...it was a compat break from the local character encodings. As to mathematics: do you imply that using a wider charset is akin to completely new mathematical methods? Or that a symbol needs to be one character? Both sounds implausible, I still must be misunderstanding...

Post by dorian-graph » Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

nkrisc wrote: post #2

I was disappointed that despite presenting the cookie banner as if it were a terminal, the options did not accept keyboard input [Y]es, I agree [N]o, thanks Ok on topic: I'm never sure what to think of these "developer" fonts that make use of ligatures for combinations like ==, >=, ->, =>, etc. On one hand they do look really nice, but I always can't help but feel it would actually make things just a little bit harde…

Post by raihansaputra » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 2:14 PM UTC

raihansaputra wrote: post #41

AlanYx wrote: post #26

It looks like this has the largest x-height of any typeface meant for developers (larger than even Fira Code). While there is research suggesting a large x-height increases readability, I'm wondering whether this doesn't push the x-height just a little too far. CamelCase words no longer stand out visually very easily -- I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Interesting point. Currently trying it out, and the x-height thing matters, similar to another feedback in this thread that says words become disjointed glyphs instead of a "shape". I'll keep this for the moment. Looks much cleaner than Fira Code, but will have to see on the readability side. Another point: not only they have increased the x-height, they also reduced the descender-height (for j,q,p,y) by a lot. I hav…