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Comment by pxeger1 | Hacker News Reader

Why do you want italics in a monospace font? I can't imagine ever wanting that.

> Why do you want italics in a monospace font? I can't imagine ever wanting that.

For the same reasons you'd want to use italics in a proportional font - for emphasis or contrast.

1. Syntax highlighting which uses both color and font style, e.g. class name are italicised by default in my editor (Sublime Text).

2. Editing markdown/HTML files with italics tags/markup.

3. Also, italics also work on the console, and some console/TUI apps may use it.

Use italics to make comments obvious instead of making them some colour that doesn’t contrast with the background much. Comments are pretty important so I don’t know why typical syntax highlighting obscures them. I think italics make them conspicuous and conspicuously not code.

I also don't understand the default muted grey comments. I usually configure comments to be a bright red color.

I can just highlight the region if I really want to read it, but mostly, I don't want comments competing for attention in my code and I write a _lot_ of comments in there. It's generally a 1:1 ratio in what I write, so if my comments were bright red my eyes would be burning at the end of the day.

Not OP but I don't use syntax highlighting, so italics makes the comments stand out a little for when I'm quickly scanning code.

Why do you not use syntax highlighting?

I find it too busy, truth be told. Colours pull my eyes in too many directions when I'm trying to read code.

It started because I'm picky when it comes to colour schemes. I'd find one or two things that annoy me and I don't personally have the imagination to fix it, so I'll try to find something else. Or I would get bored of a particular colour scheme and go hunting for something new and fresh.

Removing it took a bit to get used to but now I can't stand going back.

I don't personally subscribe to the Rob Pike idea that syntax highlighting is for babies or whatever, to each their own.

I’ve always thought of any automatic stylistic change as “stylistic highlighting”, so now I’m curious if that’s a rare opinion.

I’m with you that colors can easily start to impede readability. I’m a fan of subtle, judicious color use, so I’ll often start with a palette but knock back the colors from there.

What typeface(s) do you like for its italics?

Right now I'm trying out JetBrains mono. I don't really require much from italics but at least some visual distinction. So far I'm enjoying it.

I used Victor Mono for a bit there and I'm still unsure if I like cursive italics or not. They're interesting and fun, but sometimes I think they're a bit too out there, if that makes sense?

My go-to is usually Ubuntu Mono. That might be my favourite font.

Depending upon your motivation for monospace, the iA Writer site offers my current favourite: IA Writer Duospace.

If you want monospace for the crisp, clear, draft-style, clutter-free look when writing code (or similar) then it's excellent. If you absolutely must have every character being exactly the same width then less so as the main difference is that it is monospace for everything except 'm', 'M', 'w', and 'W' which are each 1.5 wide (so it takes two to bring things back in alignment). In practice that is often less of an issue than it seems, and the benefit in readability/clarity/looks (literal mono for those characters makes them compressed) makes it worth giving it a try, even if you only end up using it for Markdown files etc.

They have a web page explaining it (alongside a download): https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll check it out!

Hey, just wanted to come back and say thank you! Really loving this font!

No worries; appreciate the update.

i would also consider the use of font styles syntax highlighting... I saw such a thing in Turbo Pascal 5.5 for the first time and the only thing they did was the use of bolding for language keywords, like in this book: http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/borland/tur... then in Delphi 1.0: https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c38bc3b1-c3a1-2a2d-6211-c3... and in upcoming versions, it started to use italic for comments, but still no colors, yet we called it syntax highlighting. but my memories might be inaccurate :)

No, I think that's definitely fair and I absolutely agree. I just used syntax highlighting in place of colour schemes as I feel that's how most people would interpret it these days.

I use a near-monotone, dark and monospaced font and coloring; italics and bold replace color differentiation.

I find color themes with more than one or two front face hues to be tiring to look at.

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