Programming With Proportional Fonts?

theodp writes "Betty or Veronica? Mary Ann or Ginger? Proportional or Monospaced? There's renewed interest in an old blog post by Maas-Maarten Zeeman, in which M-MZ made the case for programming with proportional fonts, citing studies that show proportional fonts can be read 14% faster than fixed-width fonts. Try it for a couple of weeks, he suggests, and you might like it too. Nowadays, Lucida Grande is M-MZ's font of choice on OS X, and he uses Lucida Sans on Windows. Helvetica, anyone?"

Comments

prophecy

[Anonymous Coward]

this guys just trying to ensure the prophecy of the helvetica wars is fulfilled

Re:prophecy

[Surt]

Blasphemer! Stone him and raze his village!

Monaco

[psergiu]

Monaco is fixed-width & good looking.

Re:Monaco

[h4rm0ny]

Still, I'd be willing to give it a try. If I knew how to get proportional fonts in vi. Anyone tell me how to add proportional fonts to a terminal in KDE 4?

Re:Monaco

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, you kids and your unique characters. I use fixedsys, and typing the wrong characters has never been a pr0blem.

Re:Monaco

[Dun Malg]

Now if you could simulate a long persistence phosphor.

It's just not the same without a permanently burned-in login prompt

For bug-free code ...

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Comic Sans is simply the best. My code doesn't have bugs, it has bloopers and out-takes.

It's probably better,

[Anonymous Coward]

if you're programming in COBOL.

They're doing it wrong

[CdBee]

/. is meant to be the font of all knowledge, not the knowledge of all fonts

Re:Pencil and Paper

[Kjella]

Cue the XKCD comic with the butterflies, but I'm too lazy to find it.

Re:Pencil and Paper

[amRadioHed]

Meh, pencils have a nice sharp point and all, but dedicated card punchers are still much faster.

Re:I wonder ..

[gbjbaanb]

What if you want to add a small ASCII drawing to a comment?

You mean like this:

requirements
specification ---> o
 
original coder --> O
                  -|-
                  / \

Re:Bad for the next maintainer

[Haeleth]

I simply stay away from "clever alignment tricks". I don't align comments up that sit at the end of my code lines, and you know what? Neither should you. They're annoying no matter the font-type because rewriting one line can make you end up re-indenting all the comments in that block and it's just such a silly waste of time.

Here's a nickel, kid, get yourself a real editor. Anything worth using will be able to do it for you at the touch of a button.

Re:Stroustrup chose proportional-width

[Anonymous Coward]

You are taking the C++ inventor's advice for legibility of code ?

Re:Overrated

[FiloEleven]

I use three spaces, but I'm odd.