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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

> Do programs really have to be in monospaced fonts?

Of course not. I've been using a proportional font for at least 10 years and I'm still in business working on code bases shared with developers using monospaced fonts. Both work, none disturb the other, proportional is easier to read as any book can demonstrate. Alignment doesn't matter much.

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How do you deal with writing code with multicursors when you have to type the same thing multiple times? With monospace I just ctrl+alt+down a couple times on aligned text and then type. With proportional fonts I don't suppose it's easy to align text exactly, so do you just not use multicursors or is there a solution you came up with that works?

I’ve been a professional programmer for 17 years and have never used multicursors. I don’t even fathom under what conditions you’d want to. I use Find and Replace.

Everyone programs a little differently. I often use it when e.g. using intrinsics and I want to change types. Find and replace isn't especially helpful when they're different names with substructure you need to modify locally.

Yes and ctrl-V in vim would be super awkward.

I don't use multicursors much, not every year. I'm using emacs. I register a sequence of keys and apply it multiple times with control e, control e, control e etc.

Not sure it counts as "multicursors" but overwriting a rectangle using C-x r t (string-rectangle) is pretty handy in emacs.

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