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Comment by cacozen | Hacker News Reader

Try IAWritter DuoSpace: it’s a great mix between fixed width and proportional: https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font

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The font is a modification of IBM's Plex open font, and is available here.

https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts/

This. I use it all the time. Every character is fixed width except 'm', 'w', 'M', and 'W', which are 150%. It mostly looks and behaves like monospace, but with a very nice minor adjustment that makes it more readable and pleasant.

TLDR: 1,500 words on how iA created a variant of IBM Plex Mono with four 1.5X-width characters (m, M, w, W) because…well, it's not really clear.

And, they say, programmers use monospace fonts because it helps them catch typos. In reality, variable glyph widths make it easier to identify typos.

m, M, w, W, %, @ and i, l, ! (and so on) are the letters that create a challenge (or a room for creativity/individuality) ad they are so wide or so narrow. Wide letters often get cramped as they need to share se witdh as narrower letters. iA thought they could just modify those “extreme” glyphs to increase legibility (and readability)

Clearly, the letters are badly designed. Latin writing system was not invented with coding in mind.

Perhaps we can design a new character system script specifically designed for ease of programming! I say we use Aurebesh. :)

> Perhaps we can design a new character system script specifically designed for ease of programming!

I think APL already did this.

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