Programming With Proportional Fonts? 394
theodp writes "Betty or Veronica? Mary Ann or Ginger? Proportional or Monospaced? There's renewed interest in an old blog post by Maas-Maarten Zeeman, in which M-MZ made the case for programming with proportional fonts, citing studies that show proportional fonts can be read 14% faster than fixed-width fonts. Try it for a couple of weeks, he suggests, and you might like it too. Nowadays, Lucida Grande is M-MZ's font of choice on OS X, and he uses Lucida Sans on Windows. Helvetica, anyone?"
prophecy (Score:4, Funny)
this guys just trying to ensure the prophecy of the helvetica wars is fulfilled
They're doing it wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Blasphemer! Stone him and raze his village!
Monaco (Score:4, Funny)
Monaco is fixed-width & good looking.
Re:Monaco (Score:5, Insightful)
background: black
foreground: X11:peachpuff or #99CF96
font: X11:10x20 or Monaco 12pt
That's way faster to read than anything on a bleed-your-yeys white background.
TFA is comparing 10pt Monaco with a 12pt font. Put them both at 12pt and Monaco - which is monospaced - the way God intended computer displays to be - wins.
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background: black
foreground: X11:peachpuff or #99CF96
font: X11:10x20 or Monaco 12pt
That's almost exactly how my Emacs starts up, except I tend to use 12x24 for text documents (eg XML, LaTeX, etc) as it's even more readable; I don't do a lot of programming these days. The trick is to get the right set of colours for font-lock-mode...
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That's way faster to read than anything on a bleed-your-yeys white background.
For a lot of people (I've seen estimates between 20% and 50%), light-on-dark is much harder to read than dark-on-light, even if they wear corrective glasses or contact lens.
I get headaches from reading light text on a dark background...
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
>background: black
>foreground: X11:peachpuff or #99CF96
>font: X11:10x20 or Monaco 12pt
You just reinvented the amber monochrome screen.
Now if you could simulate a long persistence phosphor.
Maybe there's a market for used Wyse 80 amber terminals.
--
BMO
Re:Monaco (Score:5, Funny)
Now if you could simulate a long persistence phosphor.
It's just not the same without a permanently burned-in login prompt
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TFA is comparing 10pt Monaco with a 12pt font. Put them both at 12pt and Monaco - which is monospaced - the way God intended computer displays to be - wins.
You're missing the point that if you're trying to fit a certain amount of text horizontally on the screen, you can use a bigger font size with a proportional font.
Re:Dark background (Score:5, Insightful)
I call foul on this.
On paper, you need the extra white to reflect as much reading light back at you as possible.
with a computer display, the light is generated behind the text, so you don't need the sheer volume of light a white background gives you. This was even more true of old CRT displays, but even an LCD backlight produces way to much light to read comfortably. Note that non-backlit displays follow the opposate convention, and really benefit from a light background.
in conclusion, go with what you're comfortable with; what do a bunch of dorks on slashdot know anyway?
Re:Dark background (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps because most displays are sold pre-set to 100% brightness, 100% contrast, because that's what looks shiniest and most vibrant on display, driving sales.
A while back, I experimented, with the assistance of a color calibrator I use for photography (i1 Display 2 [xrite.com], and turned the brightness on my LCD to 40%, contrast to 70%.
The result? "Wow, that's so dim. I don't think I could read that..." ... for about an hour. Now it's fantastic. My eyes hurt less, especially when the room is dark, and seem more sensitive (in a good way). Reading online all day, coding... so much more pleasant. Definitely a worthwhile experiment.
Re:Monaco (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a lot of fixed width fonts specifically designed so each character is unique in appearance. That is not negotiable when programming.
oO0 il1 lilli
Re:Monaco (Score:5, Informative)
Monaco is one of them. 0 is slashed and 1, l, I and | are unique.
Re:Monaco (Score:4, Funny)
Bah, you kids and your unique characters. I use fixedsys, and typing the wrong characters has never been a pr0blem.
Re:Monaco (Score:4, Funny)
Still, I'd be willing to give it a try. If I knew how to get proportional fonts in vi. Anyone tell me how to add proportional fonts to a terminal in KDE 4?
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Monaco is fixed-width & good looking.
Um no... its not good looking.
Re:Monaco (Score:4, Insightful)
Um yes... its good looking.
See what I did there? "good looking" is subjective and when you act like it's not you come off as a jackass.
Overrated (Score:4, Insightful)
I've programmed in proportional fonts. It's ok, but I prefer fixed width for alignment.
Many years ago ... (Score:5, Informative)
... /. had a thread very similar to this.
And there were a lot of valuable inputs, like
* 1. Make sure that the font's period (.) sign and the comman (,) sign is BIG, to aid in the debugging process.
* 2. Color of the font and background must also complement each others. Too much contrast hurts the eyes. Too little will blur them up and make it hard to see.
There are many other very useful pointers in that thread. If anyone can dig that thread up it would be very very useful for the new crop of programmers.
Re:Many years ago ... (Score:4, Informative)
Could you be referring to Best Color Scheme For Coding, Easiest On the Eyes? [slashdot.org] ?
Re:Overrated (Score:5, Informative)
Elastic tabstops [nickgravgaard.com] solve the alignment problem. "Do what I mean, not what I say" with whitespace is a good thing, particularly when the width of a character can be totally different for every reader. Elastic tabstops aren't implemented in many editors yet (currently available as an optional feature in gedit [nickgravgaard.com] and Code Browser [tibleiz.net]), but once it becomes more widespread, many more programmers will be free to try out proportional fonts for coding.
Re:Overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Differing widths of tab-stops only cause problems when people mix tabs and spaces.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I did it once too, back in the early '90s. I was working on an adware program for Buick, so I used Eras as the font in my IDE (FYI, I was using a Mac, I think the PC guys were using Turbo Pascal) and it worked out real well.
But I prefer monospaced fonts because you can't save your font and tab stop preferences in a plain-text ASCII file, and you don't want your text to look like a complete mess when someone else looks at it. You can only use hard tabs, and 8 spaces is just too wide for most programming.
On
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and 8 spaces is just too wide for most programming.
Tell that to the FreeBSD foundation. Or the bulk of the kernel developers for AIX. Both places use 8 space tabs in style(9).
Re:Overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
Just use tabs. If the dork who opens your text file doesn't have his tab stop set for his preferred size then he deserves to see ugly code.
You probably use four spaces, hey? Personally I hate four spaces. Waste of space. Two is the way it was intended to be. But I understand that other people might have different preferences. With tabs we can all be happy.
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I use three spaces, but I'm odd.
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In many occurences, one can anticipate if one line will have one more or one less characters than the previous one. Having a way to quickly check this gives a little supplemantal layer of proof-reading.
this->posx=0;
this->posy=0;
tis->ttl=40;
this->source="";
The typo is easier to spot in fixed font.
Consolas (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Consolas (Score:4, Insightful)
Second the Consolas recommendation. One reason why I prefer fixed-width fonts is that proportional fonts reserve too little room for dots, commas, semicolons and other "narrow" characters, which happen to be of great importance in programming. Proportional fonts focus on text, while programming languages focus on structure.
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I do much the same. I waffle between light grey and "wheat"* for the background, but never, ever white.
* wheat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_(color) [wikipedia.org]
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second the light grey, but I use an off-white instead. The creamy colour is still white-ish so doesn't look as nasty as grey but takes the edge off pure white. Hint: you need to take the tiniest amount off, too much and the little colour square you thought looked good will turn yellow on a large panel.
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Re:Consolas (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, Consolas rules my world.
I tend to use 9-point Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.
Consolas at that size has both vertical and horizontal spacing that just doesn't look right to me. At larger sizes (11-point or more), the smaller x-height [wikipedia.org] of Consolas gives it a better look. The "x-height war" that Microsoft started where all of their standard fonts have a large x-height for more readability but far less style is reversed a bit in Consolas.
Both Consolas and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono are great programming fonts because the easily confused characters are all obviously different. I like the comma in Consolas better, though, because it's even more obviously not a period.
For bug-free code ... (Score:5, Funny)
MS Comic Sans is simply the best. My code doesn't have bugs, it has bloopers and out-takes.
fixed (Score:3, Interesting)
fixed, AKA 6x13, or more formally, -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1.
The one true programming font. No other font better manages the compromise between legibility and compactness, and being a well-crafted bitmap font, it is crisper and clearer than ever on modern LCD screens.
X11 got it right 25 odd years ago, and now with near-full Unicode support, it's only gotten better.
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or 10x20 if you have a high-dpi display.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a predominantly Unix (and -like) user myself, but X11 fonts is one department where I think work is needed. The choice between 75 and 100 dpi (newer displays tend to be far more than 100 dpi), and no subpixel smoothing? As for "fixed", it's one of the least readable fixed width fonts. Whenever I encounter it, I switch it over to "screen" (by Haeberli, then at SGI), or better yet, consolas if hinted fonts are supported.
As for TFA and using proportional fonts for programming, all I can say is that the
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I've been copying "Screen13" around to my various systems since working on SGIs in the 90s. I even have my editor set up to use the white on dark blue/purple background found in SGI terminals. Very nice readable font and text you can stare at all day.
Pencil and Paper (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the only way to write real code.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And yes, I do program in fortran.
Coding sheets. (Score:2)
n/t
Re:Pencil and Paper (Score:4, Funny)
Cue the XKCD comic with the butterflies, but I'm too lazy to find it.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Meh, pencils have a nice sharp point and all, but dedicated card punchers are still much faster.
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But compiling code written that way is awkward.
ProFont ruled the day (Score:4, Interesting)
But for whatever reason, big screens, better fonts, syntax highlighting. ProFont was quite readable in 9pt; important on small screens. I might try to put ProFont in Eclipse tomorrow. ProFont can be found here: http://www.tobias-jung.de/seekingprofont/index.html [tobias-jung.de]
Do the studies apply? (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading prose is different from reading code. I'd think that whatever you gain wouldn't be enough to make up for the loss from lack of vertical alignment.
Additionally, which monospaced font you use matters. You need one that's designed to be readable and to make clear distinctions between 0 and O, l and 1, and so on. I use Raph Levien's Inconsolata [levien.com] for coding, and it's excellent (and available under the Open Font License).
On Fedora, yum install levien-inconsolata-fonts.
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Reading prose is different from reading code. I'd think that whatever you gain wouldn't be enough to make up for the loss from lack of vertical alignment.
As long as space is a fixed width, then you should still have verical alignment... Imagine:
if ( foo ) {
bar();
} else {
otherbar();
}
vs
In fact, I think fixed space characters can put unproductive attention to variable name lenghts over content to create "nicer" looking code.
Re:Do the studies apply? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're confusing indenting with alignment. Indenting is a set of whitespace at the start of a line indicating the depth in the scope. Alignment can be anywhere, for example between variable types and their names in a structure. If you have an int element and a float element, you might put one space after float and three spaces after int, then the variable names will line up. In languages like Objective-C and Smalltalk it's common to have colons lined up in message sends that wrap more than one line. To do this, you need to be able to guarantee that the whitespace that you put in one line is the same width as the characters that you put in the other.
If your editor supports elastic tabstops, then you can use them, but then your code will look weird in something like viewvc or any editor that doesn't. This is why our coding conventions say you should use tabs for indenting and spaces for alignment. A tab is a semantic 'indent by one level' character, while a space is an 'advance the cursor by one character width' character. To have this work in a proportional font, you'd need to redefine space to mean 'advance the cursor by the width of the character directly above'. This is not impossible, but it would require a bit of hacking in the layout engine.
Re: (Score:2)
Link for hinted version (Score:3, Informative)
I thought I would have a look at this font but it looks terrible on windows with cleartype on at 11points, however I managed to find a hinted version at:
http://pgl.yoyo.org/bits/tech/inconsolata-cleartype-raph-leviens-inconsolota-font-hinted-for-windows/51:2008-09-25/ [yoyo.org]
Proportional fonts are better to read (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I understand, the way we process written words is based on the idea that each word is a like a "picture" made up of letters. So, the easier it is to identify the picture, the easier it is for us to read. This means that the width and height of letters plays an important part in creating unique pictures. It is for this reason (at least in print) serif fonts are much easier to read than sans-serif fonts. It's also for this reason that ALL CAPS is the most difficult way to read compared to just reading normal text. On this basis alone, it's likely that proportional fonts are better to read because they're likely to create better word pictures.
Reading prose versus editing code (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If I remember right, (some) Editors (the human kind that edit manuscripts) prefer monospaced fonts for exactly the same reason - they can catch errors much easier.
I typically use the font 'Monospace' although I'm not particularly attached to it.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess it just goes to show it's all down to personal taste, because I have to say I disagree with most of that. OK, reading all caps is tougher, but apart from that I find a good fixed-width font just as easy to read as a good proportional font, and serif/sans- just as easy as each other to read; if anything, sans- looks a bit nicer when printed.
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As long as tabs are fixed, and delimiters like spaces, periods, and commas are sufficiently large, I prefer proportional fonts while coding. Then again, I don't code 8 hours a day, so YMMV.
Maybe it's my old eyes, but I find serif fonts much harder to read than sans-serif.
Also, I find "ALL CAPS" at least as easy to read than "normal text". That could be because I work in the construction industry where drawings use all caps. (In fact, until several years after we switched from hand drafting to CAD, I fou
Monospaced is the only way to go (Score:2, Interesting)
Reading code is not like reading prose. It's more like reading poetry, where how the text elements are spaced and aligned can say a lot about the author's intended meaning. If I'm reading a book, I definitely want it typeset with a proportional typeface. Code, on the other hand, is MUCH more legible when set monospaced.
Not the bottleneck (Score:5, Insightful)
And there are numerous disadvantages: lack of alignment, smaller punctuation making syntax errors less visible (" '" vs "' " for example), etc., etc.
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Yeah, the only thing about a font that wou1d make code more readab1e is making 'l' and '1' not look like the same thing. Everything e1se is icing.
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Nah the two that really look similar are "A" and "A" -- Damn you identity principle.
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inilliibiliti (Score:5, Informative)
proportional fonts can be read 14% faster than fixed-width fonts
Sounds good, until brain engages, 14% later. can be always flags +10 in my wetware instance of CrapAssassin, unless BeerGoggles is displacing cycles.
I think, with maybe 60,000 hours of reading time under my lengthening belt, I'd have noticed this effect by now, if it applied carte blanch to all modes of reading. The other night I skimmed the 130,000 words supplied in response to the Edge 2010 question "How is the Internet changing the way YOU think?" This was not the cream of their efforts, but there were some interesting topical centers.
My reading speed through this exercise varied by an order of magnitude, depending on signal density. The weird thing is, for some of the longer responses, my subconscious sends notice "nothing to see here" at a skimming speed where I have no clue what words are actually flying past. Every so often, I drop out of warp speed to double check, and sure enough, not very much to see here, by whatever criteria turns my crank, which itself is sometimes elusive to my conscious mind.
I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.
— Woody Allen
I once attended a school where in some dark closet they kept copies of "Duck and Cover" films, as well as a CRM114-vintage machine designed to stretch your saccade, by forcing you to read words in a revealed window with a progressive speed ratchet.
I never did especially well compared to the best of my classmates on the quiz that followed. Had they slowed that stupid thing down to about half the speed they were forcing us to read, followed by an essay question to expound upon conceptual error, distortion, slant, exaggeration, and damn lies, I would have run out of foolscap before completing my task. In critical response, I was an autobahn surrounded by country lanes, yet many of my classmates could read for uncritical comprehension faster than I could. Dangerous skill. (I'm sure for some of my old classmates, whatever dirt path once existed has returned to nature in their adult years, with ample fertilizer from mainstream media, but that's another matter.)
It's no different with source code. You can read for comprehension, or you can read for all possible error, a state of mind where the eyes consume only a tiny fraction of total brain glucose. Critical thought in the candy factory [youtube.com] is hard enough when the conveyor flows along at a consistent speed. Neither can I properly type a long sequence of i and l characters worth a damn in a proportional font. My eyes fail to sync with my fingers, and half the letters fall down my shirt.
Nothing impairs reading speed like a tightly written algorithm where every symbol is exactly right. Nothing inflates the volume of symbols violently gouged onto the retina as a chunk of code where no symbol means precisely what it seems to mean.
Personally, I'm not lining up for smaller gouges in greater number.
I wonder .. (Score:2, Insightful)
How do you align comments, etc.? How do you do visual block selection? What if you want to add a small ASCII drawing to a comment?
The disatvantages seem overwhelming to me, and I find good monospace fonts (Deja Vu Sans Mono, Inconsolata, ...) easy enough to read. Also, some editors (e.g. gvim) will scale proportional fonts to make them look monospaced (and really ugly).
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What if you want to add a small ASCII drawing to a comment?
You mean like this:
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How do you align comments, etc.?
By tabbing to the configured ruler position in our IDE of course!
Heh, but seriously, is there a development IDE that support that thing?
Old news (Score:2, Redundant)
In the comments there, MMZ (author) notes "This was written 2 years ago."
Re: (Score:2)
Is that a pre-emptive strike against /. duping? He's got to learn to play by the rules that govern /. !
Examples... (Score:2, Informative)
Fixed width Monaco 10pt, which comes out too small and kind of blurry to me.
and Proportional Helvetica Neue 12pt, which is in a bigger font and is actually reasonable sized.
so yes, a reasonable sized proportional font is easier to read then a undersized fixed width font...
Vertical alignment (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not willing to give up on vertical alignment. And lots of code sections I've written, in addition to ascii-art comments to explain lots of code, really needs that vertical alignment. And that's not just leading alignment, it is internal alignment.
This won't break Python's indentation based syntax because one should be using consistent indentation. But many displays of proportional fonts will collapse multiple spaces into the space of one, and even Python becomes hard to read.
The solution is to have a proper display system that can do both proportional fonts AND controlled alignment at the same time, without mangling the code files themselves, for all active programming languages (and that's a LOT of them). Inserting invisible alignment into the code is not an option unless we can teach every language parse to remove such alignment elements before parsing the code for what it is coded for. Someone could do this with a new language I don't doubt. But it remains to be seen if anyone can do it in general for all existing active languages.
Oh, and if you do come up with a solution and it just can't manage to achieve it with COBOL, I won't cry. But it better work with assembly and microcode syntax.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
assembly (Score:2)
But try it in assembly language.
Lining things up (Score:2)
I like to line stuff up, such as assignments. (Tried to demonstrate this with a code sample, but /. comments collapse spaces)
So for a list of const definitions in .h file, for example, despite variable names of differing lengths, the "=" signs will all be in the same column, and the values will all begin in the same column.
You might be able to achieve this with a proportional font and tabs, but I don't trust tabs.
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Slashcode appears to strip <pre>.
It accepts a <code> tag that puts your comment in a monospaced font, but spaces are still collapsed.
reads faster? (Score:5, Interesting)
visual cues (Score:5, Insightful)
Human languages have lots and lots of redundancy, such that you can often either screw up letter order, word order, or even drop entire words, and often the full meaning is clear. Visual cues in the form of paragraphs and chapters are added to help guide the reader, but removing them would not render the text entirely incomprehensible.
Computer languages are not as forgiving, and, also, lacking redundancy, far denser. Reading speed is irrelevant because of the bottleneck formed by reading comprehension. Code is rarely read in novel-like linear fashion, but, much more often, flitting from one part of the text to another, navigating through visual cues. Visual cues in the form of often richly structured layout that includes idioms not required by syntax make navigating and comprehending code possible, and removing them although would, in most languages, not change the meaning of the code, would erect a formidable barrier to comprehension. Not using these cues to the fullest to help write clear, expressive and maintainable code is being self-indulgent and shortsighted. Requiring that a particular, and perhaps unspecified font be used for best display, rather than the ubiquitous assumption of monospaced font, is mere vanity.
Remember, when code is written, it is meant not only to be converted into executable machine language, but also to be comprehensible and comprehended by other programmers, or future selves. Clarity of expression is vital.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yup,
You shouldn't be reading code word for word anyway. Most of a programming language just symbolic (if, for, while) and could be replaced by icons and mean th same thing. The only real words are the variable and function names. As you read the names, it automatically fits them into the overall block of code. The only way your brain can do this preattentive trick [ncsu.edu] is if you provide it visual queues through syntax colo
But what about all the programmers ... (Score:2)
... out there, regardless of the coding language, who are developing and writing their code on those old punch card systems ... you insensitive clod!
Depends on the language (Score:2)
At work I do a bit of matlab programming and the default font makes it very hard to see the difference between parenthesis and curly brackets. That's a huge glaring flaw in the defaults that come with the IDE.
Back in the dark ages when I did a lot of FORTRAN77 programming, I would output a lot of data tables. Trying to setup the print statements to make those tables with a proportional font would make me want to kill someone.
Today I pick my fonts for programming on how readable the punctuation and letters
Small apples vs big oranges (Score:2)
The "article" is stupid and ill-informed.
The author compared a Monaco at 10pt with Helvetica at 12pt and concludes Helvetica is easier to read.
I could do a similar test with Helvetica at 7pt and Arial at 12pt and conclude that Arial is better!
In programming, readability is determined by different factors than for literature. Word-pictures are less important since you basically have to deal with a lot of made-up words (variable and function names) but what's really important is to eliminate any room for misi
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Stroustrup chose proportional-width (Score:5, Interesting)
All code in Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language" is presented in a proportional-width font: "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. Furthermore, my experiments show that most people find the new style more readable after a short while."
Not only is the font proportional, but it's bold, italic, and serif as well. Now, reading a textbook is of course pretty different from editing on-screen, but I remember reconsidering some of my habits after reading that book. That code ain't hard to read.
Stroustrup is guilty of worse than that (Score:4, Insightful)
Odd. My impression after reading his book was that Stroustrup deeply misunderstood the importance of coding style. And not merely because "C++" and "style" should only be combined for humorous effect: the way "&" behaves in declarations is bizarre, and his explanation read like a rationalization for a bad decision.
Only if you don't use VIM (Score:5, Insightful)
VIM renders text-area as a grid. This is compatible with column-area selection, and other features it supports which frankly I use nearly daily. While I've honestly considered using proportional fonts — I've tried living without VIM, switching to Eclipse or IDEA for several months at a time to give the IDE experience a full opportunity. Doesn't work for me, so neither will proportional fonts.
Besides there seem to be more reasons not to use proportional fonts than to use them:
Reasons to use them:
Call me crazy... (Score:2)
Call me crazy.... but I started doing this a couple years ago.
I can't remember what font it was now; I was programming under linux using eclipse.
But I really enjoyed switching away from a fixed width font...
I'd love to use a proportional font (Score:2)
Missing the Point (Score:4, Insightful)
While fixed-width might not be recommended for text, code is not exactly regular text. In a regular essay, skipping a period or a comma is usually not an issue. In code, however, it makes a world of difference, and therefore it doesn't make sense to use a font that may cause confusion between a pair of parentheses '()' and a zero '0', an 'I' and an 'l', a single dash '-' and two dashes '--', etc. Fixed-width founts are a lot clearer, and clarity and usability are extremely important for me.
Plan 9 has always used proportional fonts... (Score:5, Informative)
The programming environments by Rob Pike use proportional fonts by default. Both Acme [cat-v.org] (also used by Dennis Ritchie) and Rob's previous text editor Sam [cat-v.org] (still used by Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and Bjarne Stroustrup).
The rio terminal windows also use proportional fonts.
At first (like many other things from the Plan 9 world) the lack of precise control about how everything spaced can be a bit frustrating, but once you learn to stop worrying about it, it can be rather pleasant and liberating to use (good) proportional fonts for writing code.
RTF! (Score:2, Insightful)
I see a great need for compilers to support an RTF-to-plaintext filter on their front ends. Then you can program in whatever font you want, and it will look essentially the same when viewed by anybody else.
But there should also be a standard on what you should and shouldn't do. For instance, it should not be kosher to specify text sizes or colors. Text sizes give you the "HTML mail" problem (where Outlook e-mails show up in a tiny font because the HTML hard-codes the font point size). Text colors screw thi
Studies on people that are *used* to them? (Score:3, Interesting)
If they did those studies with $JoeRandom, they are meaningless for programmers, who see fixed-width fonts all day long.
Oh, actually I just came here to say: “Those who do not learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.” (In that some new generation thinks they have to test it for truth all over. Which can make sense... If you build up to what is already known, and not just ignore everything.)
top-10-programming-fonts (Score:5, Informative)
This was on reddit today
http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts [hivelogic.com]
Re: (Score:2)
... but try it in assembly language.
Re:Bad for the next maintainer (Score:4, Interesting)
I use proportional fonts (on whiteish background) because I'm a rebel and don't have any nostalgia for black-background-green-text terminals (i.e. I enjoy the increased readability). And contrary to your statement my code is properly tabbed, functions are aligned, everything is indented just the way FSM demands it. I know this because my coworker enjoys his nonproportional black-backgrounded terminal look and our code is interchangeable.
I simply stay away from "clever alignment tricks". I don't align comments up that sit at the end of my code lines, and you know what? Neither should you. They're annoying no matter the font-type because rewriting one line can make you end up re-indenting all the comments in that block and it's just such a silly waste of time. In my world comments go above a line, or even better is writing the code so at most it needs a little Docstring blurp to provide some context.
To recap: I'm glad you're not my boss you goddamned controlfreak. I get to read my code in sparkly pink letters as long as it doesn't affect my output or my coworkers.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This should be aligned so that the colons in the two parts of the method name line up. This makes the code much more readable, especially when you have longer or nested message sends, but it only works
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Here's a nickel, kid, get yourself a real editor. Anything worth using will be able to do it for you at the touch of a button.