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Comment by ossopite | Hacker News Reader

I switched to coding in a proportional font, Verdana, a couple of years ago and never looked back.

That's the font you are reading this comment in, in fact.

Code is mostly words and words are much easier to read in a proportional font. Symbols are plenty clear enough in Verdana, all letters are distinguishable, and I don't use mid-line alignment so I don't see the point in a monospace font outside of the terminal.

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I’m changing my editor font to Verdana now... let’s see how that works out.

Edit: it feels so wrong! Let’s see if I can get used to it.

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/lmOR9ze.png

I tried it about ten years ago. Turned out, old habits die hard. I had it for about a week, but went back to a monospaced font.

What language are you using such that inter-line relative column spacing doesn't affect your code comprehension?

> I don't see the point in a monospace font outside of the terminal

Why not use Verdana in the terminal?

Wouldn’t work well for ls -l.

I'm confused. In every modern language I've used apart from go and terraform, only leading indentation matters and autoformatters do not apply mid-line alignment or align subsequent lines against characters in a previous line.

edit: and maybe Haskell? the layout rules are complicated

personally I don't think lining up e.g. variable or parameter names in c style declarations improves readability at all, and it pollutes git diffs.

but I do use a monospace font in the terminal because many command line applications align their output into columns using spaces.

Good point, it is usually the leading indentation that matters most. I guess since I use Clojure mostly, I like to be able to line up pairs in a map, or a let binding. This could potentially be achieved with tabs, but I'm a spaces guy so I think variable-spaced fonts would be problematic.

> but I do use a monospace font in the terminal because many command line applications align their output into columns using spaces

Ah, makes sense.

Yes! I've been using Verdana for a decade. I still can't find a better screen font for coding.

Edit: https://i.imgur.com/JnMopk4.png

The trick to enjoying this is opting in/out on a per language or project basis.

Iosevka has a proportional variant with all the fancy ligatures that’s just delightful.

Most Smalltalk IDE's use a variable width font by default.

> That's the font you are reading this comment in, in fact.

Wrong. One of my favorite features of Firefox is that I get to choose whether websites can override my fonts. And they can't. Serifed Georgia is default, Ariel if they request sans-serif, and Consolas for monospace.

Curious. Does this prevent the browser from downloading webfonts thing ?

Yes. I just reloaded the Dev Fonts page with and without locked fonts and it only downloads them when the fonts are unlocked.

I forgot to mention that one may also set a minimum font size. That one does occasionally break a layout here or there, but it's worth it for easier reading.

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