3 ms·

You're just reiterating points I've already made (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22726239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22726239) but without un

You're just reiterating points I've already made (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22726239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22726239) but without understanding the point I'm making. I wasn't saying variable width didn't exist. My point was that a great many of us used to spend hours each day (many still do, in fact) working with fixed width and we managed just fine. The reason for my point is because some people on here love to overstate and exaggerate the effect different type-faces have on readability when often it's more of an issue with familiarity (eg if you only ever read fixed width typefaces then variable width types can sometimes take a moment to adjust to). To illustrate this point, use a variable width typeface in your code editor. It's still perfectly usable but man is it jarring when you're used to monospaced fonts.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> without understanding the point I'm making. You haven't previously clearly articulated your point, it wasn't clear if you were being wrong but relevant (i.e., claiming that there was no significant usability advantage to proportional fonts for text documents) or making an accurate rebuttal of a strawman argument (i.e., correctly claiming that fixed-width text has non-zero usability in rebuttal to the claim that was never made that it is completely unusable.) As such, I made the generous assumption that you understood the context which favored assuming the former, but you seem to have instead settled on the latter position. > To illustrate this point, use a variable width typeface in your code editor. It's still perfectly usable but man is it jarring when you're used to monospaced fonts. I recently transitioned to Input Sans, a proportional coding font, for all code editing full-time, after having used monospaced fonts for coding pretty much exclusively since elementary school, for a little over 35 years; it was a big improvement and the transition was not jarring at all.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> without understanding the point I'm making. You haven't previously clearly articulated your point, it wasn't clear if you were being wrong but relevant (i.e., claiming that there was no significant usability advantage to proportional fonts for text documents) or making an accurate rebuttal of a strawman argument (i.e., correctly claiming that fixed-width text has non-zero usability in rebuttal to the claim that was never made that it is completely unusable.) As such, I made the generous assumption that you understood the context which favored assuming the former, but you seem to have instead settled on the latter position. > To illustrate this point, use a variable width typeface in your code editor. It's still perfectly usable but man is it jarring when you're used to monospaced fonts. I recently transitioned to Input Sans, a proportional coding font, for all code editing full-time, after having used monospaced fonts for coding pretty much exclusively since elementary school, for a little over 35 years; it was a big improvement and the transition was not jarring at all.