MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

[1] https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/

I think it is wild that so many of us have these very strong, yet radically different, opinions.

When I'm reading fiction, I generally don't mind ligatures. I find them oppressively obscurantist in any situation where I want to know clearly and distinctly what each character is -- i.e. code and science/math/engineering.

Presence of ligatures in a "font designed for developers" is neither a plus nor a selling point. It is a pointless embellishment that shows that fonts' authors don't grok the character-oriented nature of computer languages. So them parading ligatures as something desirable only serves to detract from the rest of the font design and to nick their credibility as coding font designers.

My understanding is that if the font has ligatures then the way to not use them is to use a different font (which is fine - there's a lot of fonts out there :) ).

Is that the only way, or is there a way to disable ligatures but keep the rest of the font? Can you disable only some of the ligatures?

TIA!

Brain is really good in parallel processing of letters/symbols as units. I very much doubt that it's "objectively better". See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/develop/word-rec... for overview of the research in this area.

For me the problem with ligatures is not so much of recognizing them but reproducing. I know that for arrow ligature I have to have = and >, but there may be ligatures that I might not be sure of how they're formed. Also, when reading the same code in different environment where the same font is not available I get different visual output where not only is the base shape of the letters different but code units as well. For example three lined equals ligature that some fonts produce. I really hate it.

Luckily, everyone can get one at https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font.

Note: shameless plug ;-)

I like the narrower font so I can fit two side-by-side files with full 120 character width each on a regular 16:9 display. Iosevka is likely my forever font. I find it both beautiful and fit for purpose; I couldn't ask for more.

Re: "lines should be short." I prefer my code font to work even for bad code. It's not always my code that I'm looking at!

There are some exceptions, of course. If you are writing out hard coded matrices, you may want to line up the numbers.

But how many of us really do that day to day?

Many modern formatters such as Black for Python and rustfmt for Rust avoid column alignment and prefer indentation instead. Then the code is equally easy to read and navigate in any font of choice, proportional or monospaced.

That said, I don't see my lisp coffee caring that much. Let expressions benefit from lining up. Most other code, though? Not sure it matters that much.

> Put that in a non-proportional font, and the asterisks on the first line probably won't line up with the rest.

So lose the redundant asterisks. They serve no purpose. They make the comment both harder to read and harder to write.

You quickly learn not to care about that. So what if the asterisks in the first boilerplate line don't line up with the ones below? And which of those two asterisks should have lined up with the others?

It just doesn't matter. Everything in the meat of the comment still lines up just fine in a proportional font, just as it does in monospace.

> Now think of someone doing visual alignment of assignment operators in a block of code like you often see in Ruby

I gave up that coding style many years ago, even before I switched to proportional fonts. You end up doing stuff like this (making up a contrived example, and not in any particular programming language here):

  name                  = user.name
  age                   = user.age
  driver_license_number = dl_database(user).dl_number

Maybe it is because I am getting older and all that sideways visual scanning is not as pleasant as it used to be. Maybe it is because of the unnecessary commit diffs that this style produces.

Once I stopped doing this, I realized that the code would look fine in any font, mono or proportional.

> or any code following the indentation standard where you line up parameters in a multi-line function header with the character after the open parenthesis like you often see in Python.

It's worth noting that Black, by far the most popular Python formatter, eschews column alignment in favor of a purely indentation-based format. Python code formatted with Black is just as readable in a proportional font as in monospaced.

Here is a more extreme example from Rust, whose rustfmt tool used to rely heavily on the kind of column alignment you're talking about:

    let mut rewrites = try_opt!(subexpr_list.iter()
                                            .rev()
                                            .map(|e| {
                                                rewrite_chain_expr(e,
                                                                   total_span,
                                                                   context,
                                                                   max_width,
                                                                   indent)
                                            })
                                            .collect::<Option<Vec<_>>>());

    let mut rewrites = try_opt!(
        subexpr_list
            .iter()
            .rev()
            .map( |e| {
                rewrite_chain_expr( e, total_span, context, max_width, indent )
            })
            .collect::<Option<Vec<_>>>()
    );

> re-teach a generation or two of programmers that indenting with the tab character is good, actually

Bless you for that! This is another advantage of indentation-only formatting. It stops mattering whether you use tabs or spaces! The code will be just as readable in any font, monospaced or proportional, and it won't matter at all if one dev prefers to render tabs as two spaces and another likes four.

The key to all of this is to abandon the kind of column alignment that monospaced fonts make so tempting.

I do agree with your point about Lisp. Monospaced fonts are so heavily ingrained in that culture that I couldn't begin to imagine how to change it.

To wit, Comic Sans is recommended by the British Dyslexia Association and the Dyslexia Association of Ireland. An American Institute of Graphic Arts post from last summer said that it might be the best font for dyslexics, given its "character disambiguation" and "variation in letter heights". While other fonts have been specifically designed to be read by people with dyslexia — Dyslexie and OpenDyslexic are two — they just don’t have the availability of Comic Sans. To hate on Comic Sans is “ableist", Hudgins argues, and doing so discounts the reading difficulties of millions of people.

https://www.thecut.com/2020/08/the-reason-comic-sans-is-a-pu...

I wish I was at home so I could post a screenshot.

I guess I could have an unusual take on this, but I find a lot of mono fonts seem to have massive inter-line spacing. So much so that their appearance is almost jarring to me. I find it disruptive to read. If I had issues with the legibility of a font then I'd increase its size, not the spacing between lines.

As mentioned earlier though, I guess I'm an odd-one-out here, I'm seeking to understand how/why my view here is unusual.

https://makkuk.com/kawkab-mono/

[1] https://www.abstractfonts.com/

https://www.nerdfonts.com/

When I was about 20, after the Berlin wall came down, I rode my bike round berlin, then all round east then west Germany for three months, sleeping rough in the forest most of the time, and I think the font, on road signs everywhere, soaked into me as linked to that summer.

But you know what really creeps me about this font. It has a history dating back to the start of the 20th century as letterforms for hand painted signs, but Deutsche Industrienorm 1451 was created in 1936, the year of the of the Berlin Olympics, concentration camps had been open for three years, Triumph of the Will was released the year before. If you've never seen 'Triumph of the Will' it's an experience, I'd never understood how the fascists had managed to appeal to enough people to actually win an election, but in that film you see how they presented themselves to the people of Germany at the time and it was sophisticated. There's a moment in the film in which hilter interacts with an unemployed labourer, and in that interaction he imbues this guy with a sense of purpose, hitler has told him he is a soldier - a soldier with a shovel, it's nonsense, but it is carefully crafted nonsense. It seems to me that DIN is part of this carefully crafted propaganda, a tool to help project an vision of Nazi Germany as rational, orderly, scientific, rigorous and correct. And it does the job, like the unemployed labourer, I respond to it exactly the way goebbels would want me to.

I know I can use a Roman road without endorsing the invasion of Gaul, but there's still a horror there millennia later.

I saved the EULA in case your interpretation is accurate and the EULA changes.