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In my experience, proportional typefaces only work for code if the IDE/editor is using a pretty-printer that uses word-processor style indentation. (That is, it uses tab stops as opposed to just inserting spaces/tabs in the text.)

The only IDEs I've seen work this way was the old THINK Pascal from the 68k Mac era, and its predecessor Instant Pascal for the Apple II. Anybody else seen a more recent example in the wild?

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That brings back memories. I used THINK Pascal back in the late '80s in an undergrad computer graphics class, and it did take a little while to get used to proportional fonts. But once I got the hang of indenting with tabs instead of spaces, it was actually kind of nice. As the article says, the text was much easier to read, especially the comments.

EDIT: I checked my dev environments, and it turns out both Eclipse and Visual Studio support proportional fonts in the code editors. I had just never thought to look.

Maybe not an IDE, but the AppleScript Editor in Mac OS X (and Classic, IIRC) has you enter text in fixed width by default, but then changes it to a proportional font after syntax-checking.

Yup, completely forgot about the Script Editor. Though, as you say, it doesn't really hew purely to monospaced type, but more of a hybrid. (Hypercard was similar, IIRC.)

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