I decided to try using proportional fonts for coding starting a year or two back. It worked out well and I stuck with it, because proportional text is easier for me to read on the whole, and because it allowed more characters to fit comfortably on each line on average. I did find after a while that occasionally the lack of alignment between characters on two subsequent lines was a problem, but then I configured my editor so that it showed comments and text strings in a monospace font and that fixed the problem for me.
I first encountered this in Bjarne Stroustrup's 2000 book, _The C++ Programming Language_. As he notes in the introductory material:
> In code examples, a proportional-width font is used for identifiers. … At first glance, this presentation style will seem “unnatural” to programmers accustomed to seeing code in constant-width fonts. However, proportional-width fonts are generally regarded as better than constant-width fonts for presentation of text. Using a proportional-width font also allows me to present code with fewer illogical line breaks.
I switched years ago and would never go back to monospace.
This seems a great solution, and I'll definitely be trying it. I feel like monospace fonts are the Roman roads → horse ruts → rail gauge of our industry.
When I saw the Monaspace family linked in a HN frontpage some time ago, I installed the whole family, and now my terminal font is Monaspace Neon. I also type my LaTeX code in Monaspace Argon. They won me over Iosevka.
Input's method seems to be fundamentally very different to this. Monaspace keeps the grid intact and only changes the characters visually (situationally overlaps wide letters to neighbouring narrow characters' spaces). Input just pretends to be monospace in its aesthetics, I don't really understand what's supposed to be special with that.
Yes there is a version of Input that is a monospaced font and doesn't solve the problem tackled by Monaspace and the proportional version of Input and is therefore as relevant to this discussion as .. I dunno .. Courier New.
Very useful to mix and match various fonts based on semantics. I have a problem with Radon's l though, to me it reads like chumiZy and xenoZith. I don't understand how this could have slipped through, I can't be the only one being constantly confused.
A few people thought this, there's a GitHub ticket for it which they closed after they added a variant in v1.2 for a standard i and a loopy l that you can opt in to use.
Can't quickly find a screenshot though you can use web dev tools to add
“Texture healing works by finding each pair of adjacent characters where one wants more space, and one has too much. Narrow characters are swapped for ones that cede some of their whitespace, and wider characters are swapped for ones that extend to the very edge of their box. This swapping is powered by an OpenType feature called “contextual alternates,” which is widely supported by both operating systems and browser engines.
Contextual alternates are normally used for certain scripts, like Arabic, where the shape of each glyph depends on the surrounding glyphs. And they are also used for cursive handwriting fonts where the stroke of the “pen” might have different connection points across letters. Texture healing is a novel application of this technology to code.”
Always able to do it? Yes. Even before OpenType alternates, the extended ligature support in TeX 3.x would have also allowed for this sort of thing.
Why has no one tried it before? Because (a) nobody thought of it and (2) OpenType alternates, while they’ve been around for a while, have not always been supported in the sorts of programs that use monospace fonts (code editors and terminals)
It really only makes sense on high-DPI displays (or large font sizes), which didn’t used to be that wide-spread.
Conversely, nobody seems to be doing pixel-based hinting anymore, which is why all newer fonts tend to look terrible at small font sizes on lower-DPI displays.
Over time I must have spent several dozen hours looking into fonts, but I somehow always end up sticking to Menlo which looks just right to me.
But this one looks really good ! I will give it a spin, thanks for sharing.
i do think that the type designers did incredible work with monaspace… i used to be an Operator-exclusive kind of guy (rip hoefler x frere-jones), but i genuinely think they did enough to completely displace it from my font lexicon, which is no mean feat.
> In code examples, a proportional-width font is used for identifiers. … At first glance, this presentation style will seem “unnatural” to programmers accustomed to seeing code in constant-width fonts. However, proportional-width fonts are generally regarded as better than constant-width fonts for presentation of text. Using a proportional-width font also allows me to present code with fewer illogical line breaks.
I switched years ago and would never go back to monospace.
It's what I landed on after completing the Coding Font game submitted to HN yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575403
https://input.djr.com/
A bit weird to not mention that.
Unfortunately until editors start supporting this (and I’m not sure what would motivate them to), these remain great ideas only.
I more meant the idea of using different fonts in the same buffer to represent different kinds of text.
Monaspace is a monospace font that uses contextual alternatives: it changes how letters look depending on surrounding letters.
They are nothing alike in their approach to this problem.
(Also this is a marketing piece. Contextual alternatives is not a new tech.)
it is also a monospaced font
Mixing monosoace and proportional fonts can be a little strange, but there are some 3rd party packages or guides (prot has one iirc) to workaround it.
Can't quickly find a screenshot though you can use web dev tools to add
To the interactive demo on https://monaspace.githubnext.comContextual alternates are normally used for certain scripts, like Arabic, where the shape of each glyph depends on the surrounding glyphs. And they are also used for cursive handwriting fonts where the stroke of the “pen” might have different connection points across letters. Texture healing is a novel application of this technology to code.”
Why has no one tried it before? Because (a) nobody thought of it and (2) OpenType alternates, while they’ve been around for a while, have not always been supported in the sorts of programs that use monospace fonts (code editors and terminals)
Conversely, nobody seems to be doing pixel-based hinting anymore, which is why all newer fonts tend to look terrible at small font sizes on lower-DPI displays.