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Comment by llasse | Hacker News Reader

Especially regarding org mode I am always surprised about how most users use so little typography. Using the same settings for writing and coding seems counterintuitive yet most org modes I see in screenshots look pretty code-editorisch to me, and the styling options you mentioned are pretty much the only ones I know (missing Olivietti mode [1]) Most other note taking apps surpass here… [1] https://github.com/rnkn/olivetti

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The last thing I want when editing my diary in org-mode is distraction. I don't need lots of fancy rendering.

Which is why it's good that these are optional things... Different folks, different strokes

Same. Like a moron, apparently, I just use my text editor to get work done.

I would argue that some typographic changes (eg right amount of white space, line height etc) might lessen the distraction that you get with visual clotting. It appears here, though, that not everyone perceived it that way.. The foremost reason for use of typography in this case should be readability and accessibility and not pretty (which by itself is not a bad thing either)

I like writing in a monospaced font—it helps me focus, and it's what I'm used to. That said, I have found delight in the ability to customize certain modes to use different fonts.

I keep two fonts: a "reader" font and a "normal" font: normal is all fixed-width, while reader has longer characters for e.g. em-dashes and arrows.

I have a custom Iosevka build [1] that I use to make these. (The only difference is the `spacing` option: full-fixed-width is "term", while the reader version is "normal"—confusing, no?) I make Emacs use one or the other with a little config. [2]

[1]: https://sr.ht/~ashton314/iosevka-output/

[2]: https://paste.sr.ht/~ashton314/449022e1f17b3e506f55904941ad2...

As a group, programmers do seem quite attached to monospaced fonts. For my IDE I have actually gone (I think) even further than you: I use a proportional (serif even!) font for all my programming, not just prose writing. It took a bit of getting used to, but now I've come to much prefer it over monospaced fonts.

Inverse for me, I use mono in places people traditionally use proportional fonts - after literal decades of looking at monospaced text (right back to DOS) it's just as easy for me to grok.

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