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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

Awkward that it's written in the third person.

I can't stand the cursive text in the Sublime Text and vscode themes, and to me that goes against what I conceived Monokai to be, having been introduced to it through vim in a terminal that didn't have any cursive fonts set up. I'm inclined to think of this as like Star Wars remakes where the author messed up their own creations.

Edit: wow, it was made in 2006? Not as old as I thought! First in TextMate? I probably saw the TextMate version. I feel like it didn't have cursive back when I would have seen it, between 2006 when I got into Ruby on Rails and 2010 when I switched to vim. I actually like cursive on paper, I just never got into the fonts. To each their own I guess. https://benatkin.com/2006/04/01/editing-textareas-w-textmate...

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> I can't stand the cursive text in the Sublime Text and vscode themes

I'm pretty sure that's just the typeface used in screenshots. I use Berkeley Mono in Sublime Text. No cursive to be found.

It could be "font-style": "italic" https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/color_schemes.html#example

It may skip over it if the font doesn't have an italic variant.

Until recently most fonts just used an oblique version of the main font as their italic. With the assumption that if someone wanted a "true italic" they'd use another font specifically for that. Italic and roman traditionally being two completely different fonts, not really one a variant of the other. Now "true italic" is becoming common again and it often has that cursive look you don't like.

The complete uniformity combined with the connectedness of letters feels odd to me. I guess I have an association with connected letters and handwriting.

However I'm not sure I want oblique attribute names either, nor bold keywords. I seem to just want colors and nothing else. And I have dabbled in going free of highlighting, Rob Pike-style. https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...

Yeah it's valid. I have some cognitive limitations that makes it hard to attach meaning to colors so they are mostly distracting for me. So I've gone almost completely in the other way, my theme (based on nano-emacs) uses only one color plus black and grey. It uses typographic distinctions like font weight and style instead.

It feels like the last few years there's been some interest in this as an underexplored channel for information in code editors, so (unfortunately for you and good for me) I'd expect to see even more of it in the future.

https://github.com/rougier/nano-emacs

I might like bold but only if the colors are dialed down. I have never really given mixing in cursive fonts a chance, so maybe I should try it (don't knock it before you try it).

I actually prefer this style. Our past self in some sense is a different person than our current or future self.

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