4 ms·

Anyone have good examples of proportional width fonts that have coding focused changes, like well differentiated 0/O and I/l and or coding ligatures? I've been

Anyone have good examples of proportional width fonts that have coding focused changes, like well differentiated 0/O and I/l and or coding ligatures? I've been really happy just using Avenir for coding for the last 10 years or so, but I'd love something proportional that was a bit more coding aware. rant: Fixed width fonts are an abomination invented b/c they were easier to program for display in early terminals and computers have long since been fast enough to eschew them forever.

rami3l 5y ago
Stratoscope 5y ago
Nice to meet another fan of proportional fonts! I find them so much more readable than monospaced. My current favorite is Trebuchet MS, or more specifically a version of it that I tweaked in FontForge and call Trebuchet++. Trebuchet MS ticks a lot of the boxes for me "as is". It doesn't have ligatures, but does have easily distinguished 0/O, I/l, etc. And it renders beautifully on the high-DPI monitors I use with the largish font sizes I prefer. I do most of my coding on a 24" 4K monitor, so it's just shy of 200 DPI, and I run it with 200% scaling on Windows and Linux. One thing I don't like in Trebuchet MS is the tilde. It is a scrawny little thing that is hard to distinguish from a hyphen. So I used FontForge to swap in a much better tilde. Then I had some fun with underscores. I don't like snake_case_names at all, but some coding standards mandate them. One problem with proportional fonts is that the underscore is much wider than the period, so you get this effect: snake_case.snake_case.snake_case If you look at the spacing between words here, "case.snake" is more tightly grouped than "snake_case" - the opposite of how it should be. I fixed this by adding a bit of space on each side of the period, and narrowing the space occupied by the underscore. At first I tried just making the underline itself shorter, but it was hard to tell from a period. So instead I kept most of the underline width and narrowed the character box instead. The underline tucks under the adjacent characters a bit, but it looks OK. The net effect is subtle, but for my eyes it makes snake_case.snake_case a little easier to read and understand. I have been meaning to find out if and how I could open source Trebuchet++ (since it's based on a Microsoft font), but in the meantime drop me a note if you would like a copy to try out - email is in my profile.

rami3l 5y ago

Stratoscope 5y ago

Nice to meet another fan of proportional fonts! I find them so much more readable than monospaced. My current favorite is Trebuchet MS, or more specifically a version of it that I tweaked in FontForge and call Trebuchet++. Trebuchet MS ticks a lot of the boxes for me "as is". It doesn't have ligatures, but does have easily distinguished 0/O, I/l, etc. And it renders beautifully on the high-DPI monitors I use with the largish font sizes I prefer. I do most of my coding on a 24" 4K monitor, so it's just shy of 200 DPI, and I run it with 200% scaling on Windows and Linux. One thing I don't like in Trebuchet MS is the tilde. It is a scrawny little thing that is hard to distinguish from a hyphen. So I used FontForge to swap in a much better tilde. Then I had some fun with underscores. I don't like snake_case_names at all, but some coding standards mandate them. One problem with proportional fonts is that the underscore is much wider than the period, so you get this effect: snake_case.snake_case.snake_case If you look at the spacing between words here, "case.snake" is more tightly grouped than "snake_case" - the opposite of how it should be. I fixed this by adding a bit of space on each side of the period, and narrowing the space occupied by the underscore. At first I tried just making the underline itself shorter, but it was hard to tell from a period. So instead I kept most of the underline width and narrowed the character box instead. The underline tucks under the adjacent characters a bit, but it looks OK. The net effect is subtle, but for my eyes it makes snake_case.snake_case a little easier to read and understand. I have been meaning to find out if and how I could open source Trebuchet++ (since it's based on a Microsoft font), but in the meantime drop me a note if you would like a copy to try out - email is in my profile.