I say this every time this discussion comes up but I do feel it bears repeating: I switched away from monospaced a while ago and I am never going back.
I encourage you to try something like Verdana for a week just to see how it feels.
I encourage you to try something like Verdana for a week just to see how it feels.
The first is that Verdana is really nicely hinted, which means that, unlike most other fonts out there, Verdana has the advantage of always technically looking sharp.
The second is that Verdana is mostly monolinear, like Courier or Andale or any of traditional monospaces, there's only the slightest bit of stroke variation (most of it optical), so you get style but you don't get the distraction (onscreen) of stroke modulation
The third is that most proportional fonts have a comparatively larger pitch, so you get more characters in each line, which is also what you start seeing in 'next gen monospaces' that seem to make better use of their allotted horizontal space (and seem less wonky in general).
The last, and arguably most important, is that almost all proportional fonts (verdana included) have got style. It's hard to emphasize enough that most of the arguments for Consolas or Inconsolata or Liberation or ____ are largely due to the fact that those fonts have an overt aesthetic agenda, which is sometimes not apparent in first-gen monospaces (although, to be fair, they and their brethren are stylized, it's just that we've grow numb to it)
I'm personally a monospace sorta person (i like fedra mono)--there are some really nice (alas, non-free) monos out there to choose between that are more fun to use than the more stoic traditional monospaces. Part of why proportional fonts are appealing is that we rarely need monospace fonts anymore: their use is largely vestigial (and aesthetic-driven) and also that many programming languages (python et al) often have highly literate code that benefits from typefaces designed with legibility in mind.
So i'm just sayin, i respect where you're coming from, but don't dismiss monos out of hand. There are nice ones which are coincidentally monospace, but aren't as frumpy or harsh as the monospace fonts that are typically advertised as 'best programming fonts.'
Letter Gothic, for example, has tons more style than most other fonts, proportional or not. Verdana, in that context, is to me just as to quite a bit more boring than nearly all the fonts mentioned in the article. (Courier excluded.)
I know, i know, it's verdana, the scourge of late 90s web design but it still has style (doesn't everything?), it's just that verdana has come to encompass 'corporate' and 'default' and 'websafe' in much the same way that the verizon logo encompasses 'design by committee.' Verdana's got some serious baggage, but i would hardly say it's soulless.
And in any case, it's pointless to argue this issue, but, i dunno, ten or twenty years from now, maybe we'll look back and feel differently about Verdana (in much the same way that people are warming up to Optima (the inspiration for letter gothic) again after what appears to have been a 20 year hiatus).
It’s at least nice to see that you agree that your argument is rubbish ;-)
It's just painful to watch!
The non grid alignment, randomness, just makes it more distracting to me. Perhaps if I was exposed to it for a long er period of time, a week as you suggested, this uneasiness will slowly fade.
But, let me ask you: What's that you find so good about it? More content in less space? Why won't you go back?
As for the grid alignment, I never make block-style comments and normal indentation works just the same. I am not sure what you mean with "randomness".
Why would proportional font be easier to read? No idea, honestly. May be related to fact I read a lot of non-code (documents and fiction) as well, and those almost always come in proportional fonts.
With proportional font, the left-hand whitespace used for indentation of your code looks exactly as with monospaced font. Only the text itself changes somewhat.
The width of tab/positions of tabstops has nothing to do with font itself; it's property (often settable) of the editor (or in rare case of the underlying terminal). May be expressed as `times the space width', but that's it.
Perhaps you mean aligning of function argument and/or parameters one below another, or indentation of parts of expressions one below another? That indeed can't work with proportional font IF the peers in your project use different font (size or shape) or tab-stop setting. Can't work with monospaced font either -- again, IF the peers on your project use different tab-stop settings. Which is prevalent, AFAIK. Some use 12'' netbooks, other use 23'' desktops. I've even known a guy who used a T221 [1]. One size does not fit all.
Nb., you may want to read up on http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/ if you like to align stuff that way. I don't like that idea though.
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If you're on projects with other devs where there is an in-grained fixed-width coding practice, it may be very hard to suddenly go non-fixed.
That said, I'm not against using a nice mono font like Anonymous Pro; I used that font in Acme to write the code and thesis for my Master's.
I might actually give it a few days and see what happens.
Personally I find that kind of alignment unnecessary and creates too much busywork. Proportional fonts prevent you from even trying. (Unless your editor supports elastic tabstops, but since very few do this is moot.)
FWIW, I program in Georgia, until I find a serif font I like better. EVERYONE comments on it.
All joking aside, the choice of font should reflect what it is that you are trying to do with the text.
In theory a serifed font is more readable if you are reading the entire text, whereas a sans serif font is supposedly better for skimming through looking for something in particular.
(so on a web page with an article, the article text should be serifed, and the sidebar menu should be sans serif)
An application of this might be that if you are printing out a codebase in order to read it in entirety for the first time, you should use a font with serifs.
whereas if the codebase is relatively familiar to you, but you are printing it out and going bug hunting or reviewing the code, use a sans serif font.
I actually mix a bit of monospaced in... I have Xcode make comments monospaced. Which is nice, because it makes them fade to the background a bit.
I don't want to start an editor war but Source Insight is the best editor I've ever used and that includes Emacs and Vim. Yes I said it :-)
Would love to see a list of top 10 proportional programming fonts.
Edit: screenshot here: http://i.imgur.com/xv5oz.png
Also, what color scheme is that?
Thanks a lot!