Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I like that code is shown with a proportional font. I've been coding like that for a couple of years. It took a week to adapt but code is far easier to read now. After all we're using proportional fonts for nearly everything, why not code?

Compare proportional on Gitly to fixed on GitHub, same code.

https://tensorflow.gitly.io/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorflo...

https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorf...

However it's not what most people see in their editors. I wonder if anybody noticed or complained about it.

Two things that can go wrong with proportional code:

* Alignments like this

    a =    1
    long = 2

you can't do that unless your editor is very cooperative. That could make sharing code with coworkers difficult.

* Sans serif fonts don't distinguish between I and l and I didn't find a proportional serif font that does look good enough for code.

> Sans serif fonts don't distinguish between I and l and I didn't find a proportional serif font that does look good enough for code.

You might try Trebuchet MS. I've been using it for a few years now and find it to be an almost ideal programming font. It does have easily distinguished Il| and 0Oo characters, and it looks really good in the somewhat large font sizes I prefer on a high-DPI display. The only thing I don't like about Trebuchet MS is it has a really weak tilde (~). Sometime I will have to play with a font editor and see if I can swap in a better tilde.

Regarding column alignment, the solution is "don't do that." :-) I banished column alignment from my code a long time ago and haven't regretted it at all.

Of course, all that said, when viewing other people's code it can be useful to be able to view it in a monospaced font.

I suspect this may be an unintential CSS error. On my Windows box, the gitly source renders in Courier which is very much non-proportional.

Hi,

The default font is not proportional, BUT you will be able to set it to whatever you like. There will also be an option to disable syntax highlighting.

Could you tell me what browser you are using?

from css/main.scss `$monoFont: 'Courier New', Monaco;`

I think it's caused be the missing fallback `monospace` in that list.

Firefox Android.

I checked with Chrome and Opera and it's monospace there.

Edit: It's monospace in Firefox desktop too (Linux).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com