13 ms·

Every time programming fonts comes up, I always have to plug using proportional fonts. For me, anyway, it increases readability in any language that isn't super

Every time programming fonts comes up, I always have to plug using proportional fonts. For me, anyway, it increases readability in any language that isn't super symbol-heavy (Obj-C, for example). Xcode theme using Times New Roman: http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kweyqtEkg41qzsc93o1_500.png http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kweyqtEkg41qzsc93o1_500.pn... Download link: https://gist.github.com/coryalder/811771 https://gist.github.com/coryalder/811771 Not for everyone, of course, and definitely not for all langauges, but still worth mentioning.

MartinCron 13y ago
And here I thought I was the only one who did this.
duaneb 13y ago
For me, it's alignment that makes proportional fonts absolutely unusable.
- kennywinker 13y ago
  Tab alignment still works. I work around the rest in my theme by making comments monospaced, which I use occasionally to do ascii art.
- jerf 13y ago
  I clocked substantial time in Frontier back in the day, where alignment was fundamentally handled by the outliner core, so the text could just be wrapped as in an outliner. It works fine. I don't know what syntax highlighting would look like since I haven't seen it. It does seem like the programming environment and language must be designed for it to work nicely, though. I've tried proportional fonts in several environments since then and it's always sucked for one reason or another. Possibly Go is structured enough for proportional fonts to cleanly work though. Haven't tried it yet; I use emacs and last time I tried proportional fonts in that it was a joke. (And that was just straight-up English, no programming at all.)
  - wiredfool 13y ago
    Frontier? Me too. I even brought one of the bitmap fonts from os9 to osx because it just worked better for me. (New York 9, I think).
  - ics 13y ago
    What a coincidence! rms from a few days ago... https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-11/msg00515.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-11/msg00...
    - jerf 13y ago
      Ha! Cool. I suppose I should in fairness observe this was actually a long time ago. Since then emacs has switched to XFT; I haven't tried it since then, because well, as I mentioned most languages don't work very well with it either. But perhaps I will try it in a Go buffer here. (A few minutes later.) Hey, this isn't so bad. I'm not sure everybody would appreciate me sticking with it since it makes it hard to tell when you've got a "long line", but it's certainly radically better than I remember from the last time I tried this. For those who may want to play at home, I use the Droid series of fonts for my programming and I just eval-region'ed this: (custom-set-faces '(default ((t (:stipple nil :background "#ffffff" :foreground "#141312" :inverse-video nil :box nil :strike-through nil :overline nil :underline nil :slant normal :weight normal :height 105 :width normal :family "Droid Sans"))))) YMMV may vary, of course. Especially if you're not using a white background. :) Go's attempt to auto-align struct name and types isn't working so well, though. (Fortunately, gofmt takes care of it so I still can't be wrong.) Further follow-up: You don't realize how much you're subconsciously using the "shape" of the code to guide you until you change it and suddenly feel lost, like I'm in a fresh code base I've never seen before, despite the fact I'm actually in something I've more-or-less written from scratch over the past six weeks, which is just about the maximum level of familiarity you can have with a piece of code.
- Stratoscope 13y ago
  Alignment is the problem here, not the proportional font. I gave up alignment in my code many years ago, back when I was still using monospaced fonts. I gave it up because I was really tired of fiddling with spaces when I changed a name in code like this: myType someFunctionName(someType someVariable, someOtherType someOtherVariable, int foo) { ... } So I started doing this instead: myType someFunctionName( someType someVariable, someOtherType someOtherVariable, int foo ) { ... } I found that I just didn't care that "someVariable" and "someOtherVariable" weren't lined up one above the other. In fact, I actually liked the fact that the variable names and types were closer together, so my eyes didn't have to keep scanning across a sea of whitespace to match things up. And I really liked not having to add and remove spaces every time I changed a name. As a bonus, the overall width of my code was often much less, as in this example. Later I discovered that using this style, my code looked the same in a proportional font as it did in a monospaced font. So I switched to a proportional font and never looked back. But the code is still just as readable in a monospaced font.
  - dspillett 13y ago
    I still use space based alignment a fair bit, though it can be faf. What would be really nice is for a code editor to support some sort of elastic tab-stop so I can tell it that some things should stay aligned and have it do any extra work needed. I'm not sure how that could be made low-/zero-effort easy from a UI PoV though, but it would work just as well with proportional fonts too.
  - sanityinc 13y ago
    Plus, as variables get added and renamed, the resulting realignment of tokens modifies lines unrelated to those changes, leading to messy diffs which degrade the effectiveness of most version control tools.
    - kisielk 13y ago
      Almost every diff and code review tool I've used can ignore whitespace changes.
viraptor 13y ago
Holy kerning Batman... Maybe I'm too sensitive to this, but this text rendering engine is BAD. It says "SPA WNING". Below in SPAWNED wn is overlapping. "(sha)red" has similar problems. Lowercase "cce" however is way too wide apart. I can see how people may like the idea, but it looks like xcode was never tested with proportional fonts...
- gilgoomesh 13y ago
  Based on the bar at the top, it looks like Xcode 3. I just tested with Xcode 5 and it kerns "AW" in Times New Roman correctly.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- kennywinker 13y ago
  That screenshot is pretty old, from Xcode 3, back when I first switched to TNR. I have no eye for kerning, so it didn't bother me then, but it looks a bit better in Xcode 5: http://i.imgur.com/rRxUpDY.png http://i.imgur.com/rRxUpDY.png (included quoted text "CHARACTER SPAWNING" so it can be a/b compared).
  - edvinbesic 13y ago
    The comment is the only thing that looks super legible on that screenshot.
    - kennywinker 13y ago
      Not sure if this is a critique of my font choice, or of objective c?
      - oconnor0 13y ago
        Or of the colors?
      - 13y ago
platz 13y ago
I'm interested in a proportional font, but not times new roman.
- kennywinker 13y ago
  I've tried out a bunch, and I haven't found one I like better. That said, Open Sans looks pretty good, and you may like the sans sarif style better. If you find anything awesome, I'd love to hear about it!
  - Stratoscope 13y ago
    I've been using Georgia for years and really like it. Much better than Times New Roman, both for coding and for general reading. Georgia is a pretty hardcore proportional font, though. Even the numbers are proportional, where most proportional fonts have monspaced numbers.
    - kennywinker 13y ago
      Giving it a shot. I think I tried it out when I first switched, and wrote it off for some reason or other... but it's probably worth re-visiting. :)
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- jowiar 13y ago
  I've kicked around Sys (http://www.fsd.it/fonts/sys.htm http://www.fsd.it/fonts/sys.htm) for this purpose before and like it. I'd rather code in a proportional font, but I feel like we need an editor designed for one, which we really don't have right now. Univers is also all kinds of beautiful.
seanmcdirmid 13y ago
I am currently designing/building a programming editing environment around proportional fonts (specifically, some kind of sans serif). You can see the effect in this essay I submitted sometime back on hackernews: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/liveprogramming.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/liveprogr... Its been fun getting font metrics working right (given a custom editor) and getting key-up and key down to work correctly, but overall, I think this is the future, especially in richer editing environments.
- richdougherty 13y ago
  Very cool!
- drharris 13y ago
  I really like this, and while I wouldn't code in just any font, this one seems to lend itself. Only nitpick would be breathing room around parentheses and "." in method calls. Right now it's a bit tight. Love this article though, definitely some cool stuff going on in this space.
- bjeanes 13y ago
  That's really nice. Reminds me of the same kinds of things that LightTable has been trying to accomplish.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    I believe LightTable uses monospace fonts.
    - bjeanes 13y ago
      This made me laugh. But... just in case you were being serious, I wasn't commenting on the fonts but the project in general.
      - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
vocino 13y ago
I'd like to plug Meslo then: https://github.com/andreberg/Meslo-Font https://github.com/andreberg/Meslo-Font Customized version of Apple's Menlo font. Great monospaced font for development work. It also has a dot-zero version, which some people love.
- rys 13y ago
  The screenshots in the wiki are broken, looks like the URLs for them went bad. Going to give it a try regardless!
  - vocino 13y ago
    Ah, I see that. That's too bad, maybe I'll see if he's alive enough to accept a pull request.
EpicEng 13y ago
Eeeew... I can't do proportional fonts while programming. I like more width and I like certain things to line up. I have tried others, but I always go back to Consolas.
10098 13y ago
i can't understand how anyone can look at this and think "hey, this is nice!". I'm not sure if it's because of using a proportional font or if it's because of the serifs, but this makes me want to do this: http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4113/5031198207_ac01d2c500_b.jpg http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4113/5031198207_ac01d2c500_b.j...
- eksith 13y ago
  It's the serifs. Kerning you can get away with if the letter spacing isn't egregiously small, but in this case the letters are practically touching. Some people find it easier to process, but I never found out why.
  - dspillett 13y ago
    At high resolution such as printed text at small sizes people tend to find seriffed fonts quicker to read. Something to do with the serifs leading the eye. At larger sizes they just add distraction like any other decoration, and at low resolutions on small-ish text they can produce quite a mess legibility wise unless the font is very well designed with low resolution rendering in mind. Sub-pixel rendering help a little, but not nearly as much as some seem to think. Some people insist on seriffed fonts even for small text in low resolution environments because they find them easier to read elsewhere, without considering that the different environments (screen and print) have quite different properties (or being blind to where the difference is, I know someone who blames the OS's font renderer when he is asking it for the impossible). Of course as screens progressively move towards higher PPIs (I'd love a 24"+ display with the PPI of my phone's screen) the low resolution rendering thing will diminish as an issue.
- couchand 13y ago
  why are there serifs on a font with "sans" in the name?
mogrim 13y ago
I seem to remember reading somewhere that Stroustrup (the inventor of C++) also uses a proportional font. I've tried it a few times, but generally end up using a monospace font due to laziness - I update the software and can't be bothered to change :)
Herald_MJ 13y ago
> any language that isn't super symbol-heavy (Obj-C, for example). I can't think of any non-esoteric language more symbol-heavy than Obj-C!
- spicyj 13y ago
  Objective-C code tends to have longer method names than other languages, reducing the relative frequency of the special characters.
LaGrange 13y ago
For that to work well enough, we’d need an indentation engine that doesn’t depend on manually entered whitespace — tabs aren’t enough, because you don’t always know how many tabs you’ll need. And that just won’t work at all for certain languages (see, for example, Perl, which is pretty good at confusing syntax coloring engines with perfectly common code due to some of its design choices).
gavinpc 13y ago
Keep on pluggin'. One such comment a while back (maybe it was yours) made me finally break down and try it. I've never looked back. Before that, I would have been physically unable to not download and test drive the OP's font. Of course, I bound C-S-M-SPC to toggle back to monospace when needed. (setq gpc/proportional-font "Verdana") (setq gpc/monospace-font "Source Code Pro") (setq gpc/default-font gpc/proportional-font) ;; you have to do this twice the first time, and sometimes after that if ;; you've run it in another buffer. I think the variable ;; `buffer-face-mode-face' isn't behaving quite buffer-locally (defun gpc/toggle-proportional-font () "Switch between my default proportional and monospace typefaces." (interactive) (let* ((family (if (boundp 'buffer-face-mode-face) (plist-get buffer-face-mode-face :family) gpc/default-font)) (new-family (if (string-equal family gpc/proportional-font) gpc/monospace-font gpc/proportional-font))) (message "Set font to %s" new-family) (setq buffer-face-mode-face `(:family ,new-family)) (buffer-face-mode t)))
famousactress 13y ago
Woah, in your screenshot are the comments a smaller font size? I don't know if I could learn to deal with the proportional fonts, but I do really like the idea of comments rendering smaller.
- JosephBrown 13y ago
  The comments are in a monospaced font for some reason.

MartinCron 13y ago

And here I thought I was the only one who did this.

duaneb 13y ago

For me, it's alignment that makes proportional fonts absolutely unusable.

kennywinker 13y ago
Tab alignment still works. I work around the rest in my theme by making comments monospaced, which I use occasionally to do ascii art.
jerf 13y ago
I clocked substantial time in Frontier back in the day, where alignment was fundamentally handled by the outliner core, so the text could just be wrapped as in an outliner. It works fine. I don't know what syntax highlighting would look like since I haven't seen it. It does seem like the programming environment and language must be designed for it to work nicely, though. I've tried proportional fonts in several environments since then and it's always sucked for one reason or another. Possibly Go is structured enough for proportional fonts to cleanly work though. Haven't tried it yet; I use emacs and last time I tried proportional fonts in that it was a joke. (And that was just straight-up English, no programming at all.)
- wiredfool 13y ago
  Frontier? Me too. I even brought one of the bitmap fonts from os9 to osx because it just worked better for me. (New York 9, I think).
- ics 13y ago
  What a coincidence! rms from a few days ago... https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-11/msg00515.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-11/msg00...
  - jerf 13y ago
    Ha! Cool. I suppose I should in fairness observe this was actually a long time ago. Since then emacs has switched to XFT; I haven't tried it since then, because well, as I mentioned most languages don't work very well with it either. But perhaps I will try it in a Go buffer here. (A few minutes later.) Hey, this isn't so bad. I'm not sure everybody would appreciate me sticking with it since it makes it hard to tell when you've got a "long line", but it's certainly radically better than I remember from the last time I tried this. For those who may want to play at home, I use the Droid series of fonts for my programming and I just eval-region'ed this: (custom-set-faces '(default ((t (:stipple nil :background "#ffffff" :foreground "#141312" :inverse-video nil :box nil :strike-through nil :overline nil :underline nil :slant normal :weight normal :height 105 :width normal :family "Droid Sans"))))) YMMV may vary, of course. Especially if you're not using a white background. :) Go's attempt to auto-align struct name and types isn't working so well, though. (Fortunately, gofmt takes care of it so I still can't be wrong.) Further follow-up: You don't realize how much you're subconsciously using the "shape" of the code to guide you until you change it and suddenly feel lost, like I'm in a fresh code base I've never seen before, despite the fact I'm actually in something I've more-or-less written from scratch over the past six weeks, which is just about the maximum level of familiarity you can have with a piece of code.
Stratoscope 13y ago
Alignment is the problem here, not the proportional font. I gave up alignment in my code many years ago, back when I was still using monospaced fonts. I gave it up because I was really tired of fiddling with spaces when I changed a name in code like this: myType someFunctionName(someType someVariable, someOtherType someOtherVariable, int foo) { ... } So I started doing this instead: myType someFunctionName( someType someVariable, someOtherType someOtherVariable, int foo ) { ... } I found that I just didn't care that "someVariable" and "someOtherVariable" weren't lined up one above the other. In fact, I actually liked the fact that the variable names and types were closer together, so my eyes didn't have to keep scanning across a sea of whitespace to match things up. And I really liked not having to add and remove spaces every time I changed a name. As a bonus, the overall width of my code was often much less, as in this example. Later I discovered that using this style, my code looked the same in a proportional font as it did in a monospaced font. So I switched to a proportional font and never looked back. But the code is still just as readable in a monospaced font.
- dspillett 13y ago
  I still use space based alignment a fair bit, though it can be faf. What would be really nice is for a code editor to support some sort of elastic tab-stop so I can tell it that some things should stay aligned and have it do any extra work needed. I'm not sure how that could be made low-/zero-effort easy from a UI PoV though, but it would work just as well with proportional fonts too.
- sanityinc 13y ago
  Plus, as variables get added and renamed, the resulting realignment of tokens modifies lines unrelated to those changes, leading to messy diffs which degrade the effectiveness of most version control tools.
  - kisielk 13y ago
    Almost every diff and code review tool I've used can ignore whitespace changes.

viraptor 13y ago

Holy kerning Batman... Maybe I'm too sensitive to this, but this text rendering engine is BAD. It says "SPA WNING". Below in SPAWNED wn is overlapping. "(sha)red" has similar problems. Lowercase "cce" however is way too wide apart. I can see how people may like the idea, but it looks like xcode was never tested with proportional fonts...

gilgoomesh 13y ago
Based on the bar at the top, it looks like Xcode 3. I just tested with Xcode 5 and it kerns "AW" in Times New Roman correctly.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
kennywinker 13y ago
That screenshot is pretty old, from Xcode 3, back when I first switched to TNR. I have no eye for kerning, so it didn't bother me then, but it looks a bit better in Xcode 5: http://i.imgur.com/rRxUpDY.png http://i.imgur.com/rRxUpDY.png (included quoted text "CHARACTER SPAWNING" so it can be a/b compared).
- edvinbesic 13y ago
  The comment is the only thing that looks super legible on that screenshot.
  - kennywinker 13y ago
    Not sure if this is a critique of my font choice, or of objective c?
    - oconnor0 13y ago
      Or of the colors?
    - 13y ago

platz 13y ago

I'm interested in a proportional font, but not times new roman.

kennywinker 13y ago
I've tried out a bunch, and I haven't found one I like better. That said, Open Sans looks pretty good, and you may like the sans sarif style better. If you find anything awesome, I'd love to hear about it!
- Stratoscope 13y ago
  I've been using Georgia for years and really like it. Much better than Times New Roman, both for coding and for general reading. Georgia is a pretty hardcore proportional font, though. Even the numbers are proportional, where most proportional fonts have monspaced numbers.
  - kennywinker 13y ago
    Giving it a shot. I think I tried it out when I first switched, and wrote it off for some reason or other... but it's probably worth re-visiting. :)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
jowiar 13y ago
I've kicked around Sys (http://www.fsd.it/fonts/sys.htm http://www.fsd.it/fonts/sys.htm) for this purpose before and like it. I'd rather code in a proportional font, but I feel like we need an editor designed for one, which we really don't have right now. Univers is also all kinds of beautiful.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago

I am currently designing/building a programming editing environment around proportional fonts (specifically, some kind of sans serif). You can see the effect in this essay I submitted sometime back on hackernews: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/liveprogramming.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/liveprogr... Its been fun getting font metrics working right (given a custom editor) and getting key-up and key down to work correctly, but overall, I think this is the future, especially in richer editing environments.

richdougherty 13y ago
Very cool!
drharris 13y ago
I really like this, and while I wouldn't code in just any font, this one seems to lend itself. Only nitpick would be breathing room around parentheses and "." in method calls. Right now it's a bit tight. Love this article though, definitely some cool stuff going on in this space.
bjeanes 13y ago
That's really nice. Reminds me of the same kinds of things that LightTable has been trying to accomplish.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  I believe LightTable uses monospace fonts.
  - bjeanes 13y ago
    This made me laugh. But... just in case you were being serious, I wasn't commenting on the fonts but the project in general.
    - seanmcdirmid 13y ago

vocino 13y ago

I'd like to plug Meslo then: https://github.com/andreberg/Meslo-Font https://github.com/andreberg/Meslo-Font Customized version of Apple's Menlo font. Great monospaced font for development work. It also has a dot-zero version, which some people love.

rys 13y ago
The screenshots in the wiki are broken, looks like the URLs for them went bad. Going to give it a try regardless!
- vocino 13y ago
  Ah, I see that. That's too bad, maybe I'll see if he's alive enough to accept a pull request.

EpicEng 13y ago

Eeeew... I can't do proportional fonts while programming. I like more width and I like certain things to line up. I have tried others, but I always go back to Consolas.

10098 13y ago

i can't understand how anyone can look at this and think "hey, this is nice!". I'm not sure if it's because of using a proportional font or if it's because of the serifs, but this makes me want to do this: http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4113/5031198207_ac01d2c500_b.jpg http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4113/5031198207_ac01d2c500_b.j...

eksith 13y ago
It's the serifs. Kerning you can get away with if the letter spacing isn't egregiously small, but in this case the letters are practically touching. Some people find it easier to process, but I never found out why.
- dspillett 13y ago
  At high resolution such as printed text at small sizes people tend to find seriffed fonts quicker to read. Something to do with the serifs leading the eye. At larger sizes they just add distraction like any other decoration, and at low resolutions on small-ish text they can produce quite a mess legibility wise unless the font is very well designed with low resolution rendering in mind. Sub-pixel rendering help a little, but not nearly as much as some seem to think. Some people insist on seriffed fonts even for small text in low resolution environments because they find them easier to read elsewhere, without considering that the different environments (screen and print) have quite different properties (or being blind to where the difference is, I know someone who blames the OS's font renderer when he is asking it for the impossible). Of course as screens progressively move towards higher PPIs (I'd love a 24"+ display with the PPI of my phone's screen) the low resolution rendering thing will diminish as an issue.
couchand 13y ago
why are there serifs on a font with "sans" in the name?

mogrim 13y ago

I seem to remember reading somewhere that Stroustrup (the inventor of C++) also uses a proportional font. I've tried it a few times, but generally end up using a monospace font due to laziness - I update the software and can't be bothered to change :)

Herald_MJ 13y ago

> any language that isn't super symbol-heavy (Obj-C, for example). I can't think of any non-esoteric language more symbol-heavy than Obj-C!

spicyj 13y ago
Objective-C code tends to have longer method names than other languages, reducing the relative frequency of the special characters.

LaGrange 13y ago

For that to work well enough, we’d need an indentation engine that doesn’t depend on manually entered whitespace — tabs aren’t enough, because you don’t always know how many tabs you’ll need. And that just won’t work at all for certain languages (see, for example, Perl, which is pretty good at confusing syntax coloring engines with perfectly common code due to some of its design choices).

gavinpc 13y ago

Keep on pluggin'. One such comment a while back (maybe it was yours) made me finally break down and try it. I've never looked back. Before that, I would have been physically unable to not download and test drive the OP's font. Of course, I bound C-S-M-SPC to toggle back to monospace when needed. (setq gpc/proportional-font "Verdana") (setq gpc/monospace-font "Source Code Pro") (setq gpc/default-font gpc/proportional-font) ;; you have to do this twice the first time, and sometimes after that if ;; you've run it in another buffer. I think the variable ;; `buffer-face-mode-face' isn't behaving quite buffer-locally (defun gpc/toggle-proportional-font () "Switch between my default proportional and monospace typefaces." (interactive) (let* ((family (if (boundp 'buffer-face-mode-face) (plist-get buffer-face-mode-face :family) gpc/default-font)) (new-family (if (string-equal family gpc/proportional-font) gpc/monospace-font gpc/proportional-font))) (message "Set font to %s" new-family) (setq buffer-face-mode-face `(:family ,new-family)) (buffer-face-mode t)))

famousactress 13y ago

Woah, in your screenshot are the comments a smaller font size? I don't know if I could learn to deal with the proportional fonts, but I do really like the idea of comments rendering smaller.

JosephBrown 13y ago
The comments are in a monospaced font for some reason.