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MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

monolisa.dev

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Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#211

Post by FridgeSeal »

lmm wrote: post #180
blindmute wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A ligature is more functional than not using one. They obscure the code for about 5 seconds the first time you see them, and then never again. After those 5 seconds, you register a new semantic symbol in the brain. It is objectively easier for your brain to parse a single arrow symbol than it is to parse => in a monospace font. For the latter, you are scanning two symbols and only after seeing them both can your brai…

If your programming language wants to use an ⇒ symbol there's a perfectly good codepoint for that already. I don't want complexity to be hiding in my font where I would never even think to look for it. (For example imagine searching the documentation to understand a use of ⇒ and finding it doesn't exist in your programming language)

I use Fira code, and the ligatures for >=, make it so much faster and easier to identify the symbols.

I wouldn’t know where to get the “⇒” codepoint, and getting is probably more effort than just writing “==>” with the added benefit of my teammates not having to use the ligature (or figure out the symbol) if they don’t want to either.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#212

Post by shadowofneptune »

mikojan wrote: post #11

Not a fan of these sharp modern faces in general. However, the small text in this one looks particularly "smudgy". I stopped hopping monospace fonts when I discovered Go Mono. Go Mono does not seem to get blurry even at small sizes. M, m, n always look impeccable. Not so here. I'm not sure. Maybe something is wrong with the text-rendering in my browser.

I very much like Go Mono, despite it being something of an oddball.

https://www.programmingfonts.org/#go-mono

A serif monospace font that doesn't look it came from a typewriter? Very little separation between letters? A font made for specifically for typesetting one programming language? It really doesn't seem like it should work, but it does for me. I have it installed as the system monospace font on every computer I can.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#213

Post by Maxence »

I find that font very beautiful and pleasant to look at.

That said, the licensing seems completely out of touch from reality to me. Today we are living in the cloud area, where data and and workspace are replicated across devices. When I read that you need multiple licences to have it on more than 2 personal devices, that sounds too much of a hassle to consider buying it.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#214

Post by k3liutZu »

zestyping wrote: post #125

Please stop it with the "coding ligatures" already. They are not helpful and only serve to obscure the code being written. This has got to be one of my least favourite trends in programming aesthetics these days. For a font claiming to "follow function" to devote so much effort to sacrificing function for the _vogue du jour_ is especially rich.

Why?

I love them ligatures. I'm looking at this code for lots of hours every day. Let me enjoy it via a nice font — with ligatures — if I deem so.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#215

Post by junon »

kbd wrote: post #24

Unfortunately not available to compare on https://www.programmingfonts.org/ While I'm here: Victor Mono has been my programming font of choice for a while now: https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/ Oh, look at that, the Victor Mono homepage has a font comparison slider that allows you to compare it to MonoLisa! MonoLisa advertises that it's wider than other monospace fonts, and you can really see that in the compariso…

Thank you, this one actually helps me read quite a bit.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#217

Post by galkk »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #164
amake wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop it with the diatribes about ligatures. If you don't like them, don't use them. It's that simple. Other people do like them, and will continue to use and enjoy them.

Serious (if goofy:) ) question: How do I not use them? My understanding is that if the font has ligatures then the way to not use them is to use a different font (which is fine - there's a lot of fonts out there :) ). Is that the only way, or is there a way to disable ligatures but keep the rest of the font? Can you disable only some of the ligatures? TIA!

Literally every IDE that I used has checkbox to disable ligatures. Idea, VS, VSCode. Kitty terminal also has setting to turn them on/off.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#218

Post by GoblinSlayer »

thiht wrote: post #103
andjd wrote: post #78

I'm going to hop on my hobby horse again for a second: One of their first points is this: >Designing a monospace font is much harder than a traditional, proportional one: being constrained by the same width of all glyphs can result in a boring or unreadable font. And they're absolutely right. But it begs the first-principals question-- why code using a monospace font? Today, every major editor that isn't terminal-bas…

> why code using a monospace font? Because unlike prose, we don’t reason about code in terms of words, sentences or paragraphs but rather in terms of statements, lines and blocks. Navigating between visual lines vertically makes sense when navigating in code. And to optimize this kind of navigation, monospace fonts are the best choice because where your cursor lands is predictible. It also brings cool features such a…

For me legibility is more important: unlike prose, for code it's much more important, what's written in those lines, and monospace fonts sacrifice legibility for columns. And no, monospace fonts can't make cursor land where it needs to, because the destination can be anywhere on the line.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#220

Post by GoblinSlayer »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #90
andjd wrote: post #78

I'm going to hop on my hobby horse again for a second: One of their first points is this: >Designing a monospace font is much harder than a traditional, proportional one: being constrained by the same width of all glyphs can result in a boring or unreadable font. And they're absolutely right. But it begs the first-principals question-- why code using a monospace font? Today, every major editor that isn't terminal-bas…

> And they're absolutely right. But it begs the first-principals question-- why code using a monospace font? Today, every major editor that isn't terminal-based supports proportional width fonts beautifully. There was a whole "coding font" family designed around the idea that we should be using proportional fonts for this, and it makes a great case... https://input.djr.com/info/ ...except that just about every time I…

FWIW, Verdana aligns those asterisks just fine. I do think deleting those asterisks makes documentation better and I personally write documentation without asterisks. Why they are there at all? It's just noise.
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