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Ask HN: Anyone using proportional fonts for coding?

42 points by rpastuszak ↗ HN
(I don't find them distracting and I enjoy messing with typography.)

I'm curious about any less obvious pros and cons, as well as recommendations for any fonts to try.

89 comments

[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] thread
iefbr14
Good luck with positional languages :)
rpastuszak
Care to elaborate?
iefbr14
Take cobol. The data division is highly column based, not mandatory though but you never get any of the columns straight except the first one. It will work but its hard on the eyes. Take (ibm) assembler, it sometimes needs a continuation character in column 72. Where is column 72 in proportional?
rpastuszak
hehe, I can live with that, I punch my cards by hand like a true 10x engineer.
CoastalCoder
Punch cards??? Luxury!

Why, when I was a lad, we had to punch paper tape by hand! And it wasn't any of this buy-it-by-the-roll stuff either. My da' would send me to the woods, and I'd have to chew a branch for a week to make my own paper!

wredue
Back in my day we had real man’s trees rather than the silly “programmer” soft lad trees. It took us a MONTH to chew our punch cards.
bratgpttamer
Real Programmers don't use punch cards; they toggle the programs in directly via front-panel switches (in octal).
CoastalCoder
Oh, we're talking about real programmers?

Well, real programmers just tweak the bias voltages on the op-amps driving the transistor networks.

And not using the potentiometers that today's "real programmers" use. No sir, when I was a lad...

overvale
I use them from time to time. I'm not working on large codebases with collaborators, just my dotfiles and CSS and stuff. If I was auditing other people's code I don't think I'd want proportional fonts, simply because in code every character matters.
nahuel0x
If you use VS Code, the search results and file explorer text use a proportional font because you cannot change it. Is a long standing bug and is annoying.
Kwpolska
I wouldn't want monospace for the file explorer, since the benefits of monospace don't really matter for files, and proportional fonts take up less space. Being able to fit more text is also better when searching, and if you need to see stuff in the monospace font, you can open the file or open search in an editor.
eviks
If only there were a modern code editor that supported variable-width tabs that would maintain vertical alignment with variable-width fonts...
seanmcdirmid
With auto formatters that automate indenting (and disallow custom indenting), I don’t think that really matter anymore.
eviks
bad tools can't eliminate the import of good formatting
sangpal
I used Input Sans for some time as my coding font. Most proportional fonts have a small <space> which makes it difficult to figure out alignment in code. Input Sans was the only font I found that was good in this regard.

I use vim keybinds and movement was too unpredictable to keep using as my main font. Now I'm back to a monospaced font.

cacozen
Try IAWritter DuoSpace: it’s a great mix between fixed width and proportional: https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font
CharlesW
TLDR: 1,500 words on how iA created a variant of IBM Plex Mono with four 1.5X-width characters (m, M, w, W) because…well, it's not really clear.

And, they say, programmers use monospace fonts because it helps them catch typos. In reality, variable glyph widths make it easier to identify typos.

mrunseen
m, M, w, W, %, @ and i, l, ! (and so on) are the letters that create a challenge (or a room for creativity/individuality) ad they are so wide or so narrow. Wide letters often get cramped as they need to share se witdh as narrower letters. iA thought they could just modify those “extreme” glyphs to increase legibility (and readability)
firewolf34
Clearly, the letters are badly designed. Latin writing system was not invented with coding in mind.

Perhaps we can design a new character system script specifically designed for ease of programming! I say we use Aurebesh. :)

JohnFen
> Perhaps we can design a new character system script specifically designed for ease of programming!

I think APL already did this.

kcartlidge
This. I use it all the time. Every character is fixed width except 'm', 'w', 'M', and 'W', which are 150%. It mostly looks and behaves like monospace, but with a very nice minor adjustment that makes it more readable and pleasant.
jrm4
Broadly, it just seems weird that this appears to be such a difficult problem TODAY.

As in "Just tell the AI what code you want to write and the language and it will just magically do it for you" is like, sure, no problem, but we absolutely draw the line at "Use proportional fonts to make the code read nice on a page" because thats WAY TOO HARD

nequo
What is your proposed solution?
jrm4
It feels as if there could be some "smart-ish" way to analyze and present source code with proportional fonts, but indent and move as needed.
iimblack
Even if you’re a heavy user of AI for coding you have to read what the AI wrote. Code isn’t like other writing where you can skim past letters and your brain will fill it in for you. In code, each character is significant with even the case of single letters being important. I think it makes sense to optimize for clarity. Additionally, vim keybindings are significantly more awkward on non-monospaced fonts.
SoftTalker
You'd probably have to use tabs to make your indented blocks and other alignment look nice. Then you get into the whole tabs vs. spaces debate.
seanmcdirmid
Why? Most companies are requiring auto formatters these days, so it doesn’t really matter if you can’t precisely align code.
SoftTalker
Really? I've never used an autoformatter for anything ever, much less had one required. Which companies are these?
seanmcdirmid
Google (I think they started the trend with Go?), Facebook, Amazon, … which companies “don’t” require auto formatters would be more interesting and specific.
NBJack
Google leaves that as a team preference. Go certainly has highly opinionated style enforcement, but it is surprisingly not automatic formatting across the board.

Amazon may have changed, but this is also not universal. Team preference, though they may be enforcing it in the older code base for the site (i.e. detail pages, etc.).

Facebook is the only one on your list I can confirm does, in part perhaps due to the predominant language (Hack).

hollerith
I'm curious what line-length limits these company's have (either imposed by an autoformatter or imposed by informal means).
Renevith
I've used Input Sans for years. I was expecting to have to deal with alignment issues but in my Java codebase there were almost none. (YMMV depending on language and coding style.) The only alignment we use is with leading spaces only, so everything still aligns as expected. The readability is great and I can fit substantially more characters horizontally than I could with a fixed-width font.

It definitely felt weird at first, like I was reading code that somebody had pasted into Microsoft Word. But that passed and now it's all upside.

I screen-share my IDE from time to time and I've never had anyone comment on it.

nielsbot
Same here. I find it much more legible. I can also finally move beyond the teleprinter and vintage terminal screen legacy of monospaced fonts. I’m a person not a robot :)
seanmcdirmid
I’ve used proportional fonts for more than a decade now. Since auto formatters disallow ascii art or custom alignment anyways, I’m honestly not missing out on anything, and just get to enjoy kerning in my code. I use whatever sans serif is used most on my platform (ATM it’s google sans), using a serif want would probably annoy me a lot.

Oh, what we are really missing are code-oriented ligatures, like -> or ==>. Sad, but I find fixed width so bothering that I’m not willing to try the fixed width fonts that offer such ligatures.

hyperhopper
> Since auto formatters disallow ascii art or custom alignment

This is not a universal truth. I've worked at faang companies that don't even do this.

In fact many great comments I've seen have been ASCII art diagrams. Those should be encouraged.

seanmcdirmid
I haven’t seen any such in the last five years. Maybe C or C++ code? Java and kotlin auto formatters are pretty entrenched at this point, Python always has been, not sure about other language cultures.
eternityforest
I did not know till I saw this comment how many ascii art and even diagram tools existed for vs code! I will probably be making use of some!
LorenDB
Hot take: ligatures bother me nearly as much as a proportional for would bother me.
seanmcdirmid
Sure, I mean if non-type writer fonts bother you, I’m sure other aspects of modern typography would also be off putting.
xigoi
This is a cold take. Many people on HN hate ligatures.
psd1
A "hot take" is an initial reaction, without benefit of much data or consideration.

Like when someone shouts to you after they've already thrown, and you must turn and catch in a fraction of a second. Or take a ball to the jaw.

You've expressed a considered preference, not a hot take.

CharlesW
I propose we start the revolution with comment blocks.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Xc...

metadat
What is the colon (:) thing about?

E.g.

    /*:
       Some comment
     */
Is there a legitimate reason for the non-C addition atop a C-syntax?

Edit: Thanks for explaining!

thristian
It seems to be a convention that means "this comment contains Markdown and should be rendered in the generated documentation" as opposed to commenting out unused code or whatever.
zabzonk
stroustrup switched to using a proportional font in TC++PL 3rd ed. i really didn't like it, but i know quite a few people did. all comes down to taste as far as rendering is concerned, i suppose. but the program text must be able to be rendered in either a fixed or a proportional font, and look sensible in either. and that is not so easy.
Kwpolska
It's very easy if you don't align things (e.g. try to keep the = in multiple assignments in the same column) and use a fixed width (1 tabstop?) for continuation lines.

Or, if you are typesetting a book, you can do alignment in the typesetting software instead of adding spaces.

jwells89
I've tried a few times over the years but it never sticks. Proportional fonts make scanning for character-level differences slower and most don't distinguish important characters strongly enough (e.g. parens and brackets taking less space than alphanumerics). I'll echo others' comments on alignment too.

To my eye, they also just make code look… I don't know, messy somehow? Especially with serifs it looks like a tractor trailer wrecked and spilled its payload of characters all over the place.

hackinthebochs
I switch between golang's proportional font and Nirmala UI. They look really good on high dpi screens and are just generally attractive fonts. Indentation width is a drawback since space characters tend to be small. Code that uses two spaces for indentation is not nearly enough of an offset in my opinion. Four space indentation looks like two space for a monospace font, which is generally good enough. Also punctuation can be an issue as proportional fonts tend to have small, easy to miss punctuation.
jdougan
Use tabs to left indent, and you can then use whatever spacing you want for readability.
jitl
My dad does, which used to drive me nuts when I wanted to help him out when I was in college. These days I think it sounds like a good idea but I haven’t tried it yet.

I bet it would traumatize some of my VIM diehard teammates.

Pxtl
This should be workable and reasonable if you use tabs to indent and don't do any alignment. Imho that's good practice but there's always somebody stubborn.
kevin_thibedeau
They preclude ASCII and Unicode diagrams.
rhn_mk1
They preclude ASCII, but not Unicode diagrams.

Unicode block characters have constant width.

Unicode also contains fixed-width equivalents to ASCII letters: ａｂｃ. Just add 0xFEE0 to the code point.

And 0x3000 is an ideographic space, with the same width.

    +---------+
    |         |                        +--------------+
    |   NFS   |--+                     |              |
    |         |  |                 +-->|   CacheFS    |
    +---------+  |   +----------+  |   |  /dev/hda5   |
                 |   |          |  |   +--------------+
turns into

    ＋－－－－－－－－－＋
    ｜         ｜                        ＋－－－－－－－－－－－－－－＋
    ｜   ＮＦＳ   ｜－－＋                     ｜              ｜
    ｜         ｜  ｜                 ＋－－＞｜   ＣａｃｈｅＦＳ    ｜
    ＋－－－－－－－－－＋  ｜   ＋－－－－－－－－－－＋  ｜   ｜  ／ｄｅｖ／ｈｄａ５   ｜
                 ｜   ｜          ｜  ｜   ＋－－－－－－－－－－－－－－＋
EDIT: which would have looked much better had HN not replaced full spaces with the narrow kind.
Kwpolska
Those diagrams might look nice, but are hard to edit (for your average user without a CJK input method) and hard to copy things from (you can't get the string /dev/hda5 from your example, you'll get something Linux won't do anything meaningful with.)
rhn_mk1
I don't think diagrams are meant to be copy-pasted from a lot, so I'm not worried about that.

For editing, I'd just use a conversion tool, and edit it in a fixed-width editor rather than directly in code. Yes, it's an extra tool, but I don't think it's that outlandish to edit pictures in a tool for editing pictures.

hollerith
My experience is that I get annoyed when text isn't copyable whether or not the author means for it to be copyable.
kazinator
... but issues would never happen outside of HN, so this is all cool.
retrocryptid
I know ThinkPascal back in the day used a proportional font, but I think I remember MPW using mono. My CanonCat uses a proportional font when you write FORTH programs for it.
_moof
Was just going to mention THINK Pascal. It used 9-point Geneva, and bolded keywords, if I remember correctly.
retrocryptid
Yup. That's the one I'm thinking about. Oh. And an early version of MS BASIC for Mac did something similar.
jdougan
Smalltalk environments have defaulted to proportional fonts back to the beginning of time [1]. Some of the newer ones allow for richtext code, so if you really need to make that ascii art drawing, you can change the font in the comment. Also look up elastic tabstops for an alternate alignment solution.

The tricky part is there aren't many proportional fonts designed for coding (but more than there used to be). One early 90s version of ST defaulted to Helvetica, which was a nightmare to read on the then current lowres screens. Of the current choices, Input is probably the best place to start. Verdana is popular with some, and I've used Lucida a bunch, both sans and serifed. I have also had fun using not really suited display fonts like Zapfino or surprisingly readable drafting handwriting fonts like Tekton. I am currently fiddling with using various ports of the TeX fonts, particularly the CM Concrete as I find the big serifs easy to read. It is usually recommened to use a sans font for readability, but I think that advice is outdated on modern very hires displays with subpixel antialising.

[1] https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1693628/cream-10p...

The proportional fonts question recurrs periodically:

2005 https://ask.metafilter.com/16469/Proportional-programming-fo...

2010 https://slashdot.org/story/130020

https://www.quora.com/Are-monospace-or-proportional-fonts-be...

2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18958046

mieses
fonts? real programmers use paper and pencil
isr
I've been using cuis smalltalk with proportional fonts, even a slightly cursive looking one.

And before you get your pitchforks out, that's from a longtime (since 1998) vim user, whose other current weapon of choice is a neovim setup which acts as as its own multiplexer, thereby replacing gnu-screen (tmux for the rest of you).

In cuis, the morphic graphics system has been rebuilt to be entirely vector-graphics based. Entirely. Everything. The text rendering is beautiful. Each window can be scaled up or down with just a right click to bring up the 'halo', and then just drag the icon. The fonts are redrawn with vector graphics. There is zero quality loss, up or down.

Scaling up or down to cater for different dpi screens is no longer an issue.

The beauty of it is actually a little inspirational, as silly as that sounds. You feel like you have an expensive Japanese-nibbed fountain pen, and high quality parchment, and it forces you to write something.

(yes, the rendering quality remains, even if you also rotate the window as well).

slim
one trick that always impresses is when you rotate the window and scroll the text.