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Monaspace

monaspace.githubnext.com

71–80 of 206 posts

Re: Monaspace

#71
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/

This has a "Silicon Valley tabs vs spaces" Richard vibe all over it. Nobody's forcing you to use ligatures - it's IDE / font specific.

Re: Monaspace

#72

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…

Like most things in life, it depends on the reader:

- native language

- mathematically or symbolically oriented

- etc.

I personally find them imminently readable and use with Fira Code font.

Re: Monaspace

#73
It's a shame that on VS Code at least (I'm not sure if this applies in other contexts), the "textual healing" feature goes hand-in-hand with ligatures. There is no way to enable textual healing if you prefer not to use programming ligatures.

Re: Monaspace

#74
I'm always really confused about how dotted zeroes became the norm for these fonts. I always confuse them with eights and vastly prefer slashed zeroes. Would love to try this if it had such a variant.

Re: Monaspace

#75
post #45
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.

I’m probably missing the obvious, but it seems to just make the “m” wider.

The issue with that is that it would reduce the space between pairs that need it (such as mb). Taken to an extreme, mm would run together into one letter.

Re: Monaspace

#76
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.

It doesn't in this font? Possibly because of what they talk about where it optimistically gives as much space as possible to succeeding glyphs. You can try it on the page; the code sample boxes are editable. I see no jumping when I type "calming", their example word.

[append] Oh, I do see some jumping when I type "optimized". Honestly, it doesn't seem very jarring to me; the jumping is always right where the edit point is so the added or removed letter causes a much bigger jump.

Re: Monaspace

#77

It's a shame that on VS Code at least (I'm not sure if this applies in other contexts), the "textual healing" feature goes hand-in-hand with ligatures. There is no way to enable textual healing if you prefer not to use programming ligatures.

From https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace?tab=readme-ov-file#v...

> If you want coding ligatures but do not want texture healing, you can elide the calt setting:

Re: Monaspace

#78

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.

Alacritty does not support that, afaik.

Re: Monaspace

#79
I'm bothered by the Rd symbol of Radon on the page, it's should be Rn. It makes me double-check if there's actually an element that's not Radium (Ra), not Radon (Rn), but also starts with an R and has a d in its name.

Re: Monaspace

#80
post #74

I'm always really confused about how dotted zeroes became the norm for these fonts. I always confuse them with eights and vastly prefer slashed zeroes. Would love to try this if it had such a variant.

There's languages where a slashed circle is a letter, and a slashed zero makes things confusing. Dotted zeroes have much less opportunity for confusion in that direction. I guess type designers could emphasise the convex sides of a dotted zero with the concave sides of an "8" to keep them visually distinct, but I don't know if this font does that.
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