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Comment by jypepin | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the effort, the font looks solid, but I really don't understand the new trend of using italic in the code syntax. It seems like every trendy frontend engineer has their sublime text or vscode set up with a font that uses italic for imports, comments, etc and I really don't see the appeal.

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From the OP's section titled "Why?" :

> When it comes to programming fonts, I prefer something strict, readable and relatively condensed for the code proper, complemented with a more informal, flowing and human style for things like comments and reserved keywords.

Also from FAQ :

> A programming font with cursive italics and ligatures is the worst idea in the world. This is absolutely horrible. BTW, I am really angry.

> [Answer:] Not really a question, but anyway: People actually like different things. And it's OK. It's OK if someone else prefers a different font for code than you do. We don't have to use the same one. ️

(though obv. parent post is not hostile like this Q)

Shouldn't it be called "A sophisticated programming font" then? :D

only if it is also "for humans".

Seems like the submission title was changed in the meantime?

When I made the comment it was "The sophisticated programming font".

> hostile

You probably have never heard a cursing Italian.

Which only moves the question back a step. Why, exactly, make reserved words, comments, tag attributes, etc., explicitly less readable than the rest of the painfully wispy text?

I find this font terrible on a readability basis to start with. The italics just double down on the hatred of eyes. I get a designer wanting to imitate a lot of currently popular san serif fonts (though not why they would make the font so skinny and less readable than those fonts), but coding fonts are meant to be comfortable and readable, not pretty.

Considering the author of this font pretty much made it for their own use, the answer to your question becomes: because that's their personal preference. No one needs to justify what font they prefer.

Then they decided to be nice and share it with the world for free.

Thank goodness the idea that something is free must automatically shut down any criticism hasn't taken over. We wouldn't have anything good.

Agreed, no one should be above criticism, even if free.

Not sure how you drew that conclusion. But asking "why <subjective aesthetic preference>?" is not going to get you anywhere. Someone made a font for their own use because they personally enjoy. They then shared it for free with anyone else who might also enjoy it. There are certain color combinations I prefer for text and background that other people probably hate. I couldn't tell you why I like them, though.

Readability can be generalized (tiny text is almost universally difficult to read) but it's also very much a personal thing in other ways. You can criticize one's preference all you want but it hardly seems productive. I get a lot of flak for preferring green apples to red apples, but no amount of convincing will change my mind.

>Which only moves the question back a step. Why, exactly, make reserved words, comments, tag attributes, etc., explicitly less readable than the rest of the painfully wispy text?

I have no insight into the author's mind, but I can only assume the answer is, "because they prefer it that way." Why else would they have taken the time to do so if it's for personal use?

It’s something similar to syntax highlighting. We (or at least myself) doesn’t ‘read’ keywords to read code, it’s mostly syntax highlighting and the ‘shape’ of the code around the keyword, and the length of keyword. You really don’t need the exact characters to parse code in your head. The cursive characters give another visual distinction of the keywords.

I guess it's just one more visual marker, perpendicular to e.g. colors so you get twice the possibilities.

Whether italic or bold or colors or anything, I find that too much visual marking is bloat, unecessary cognitive load which overemphasize syntax, detrimentally to flow — it's harder to gain more perspective when you're kept so 'in it'. Good typographic rules very much apply to code as well.

I personally think ~3 to 7 marking variations are usually enough to convey a general paradigm.

The font includes both oblique (i.e. italic not cursive) and the cursive versions, so you don't have to use cursive if you prefer not to.

It's a very extensive and detailed piece of work.

Fashion is not supposed to make sense. That's why it's called fashion.

The only thing that matters is that it's different and criticized by "the others" that you think you are superior to (old programmers who use boring fonts)

You think the only reason people like aesthetics is to feel superior?

What's interesting to me is that if you use one of these fonts in an editor with Rust or another language they'll usually look quite like any other regular font without any fancy cursive or whatnot.

My assumption is that it's the editor's implementation, but I found it interesting that the use of these fonts (or at least, proper implementation thereof) seems to lean heavily towards Javascript.

Or am I missing something here?

(FWIW I'm a fan of italics for comments - here's what my setup looks like https://imgur.com/a/jTXHIo2)

Direct URL: https://i.imgur.com/kGw7a63.png

No Imgur, I don’t want to accept your cookies policy just to see an image.

I don't really like syntax highlighting most of the time, because I have an astigmatism and bad eyesight that make colored text hard to read. However, I want to be able to easily distinguish commented-out code blocks. So I make comments italic.

They look cool. The productivity gain from keeping things outweighs any productivity loss from the italic text being hard to read. That's just me, of course.

Italics is fine, depending on how light the change is, but cursive definitely doesn’t work very well.

well the italics of regular fonts are fine. it's the cursive thing that's excessive.

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