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

Overrated

[tjstork]

I've programmed in proportional fonts. It's ok, but I prefer fixed width for alignment.

Re:Overrated

[ceoyoyo]

Just use tabs. If the dork who opens your text file doesn't have his tab stop set for his preferred size then he deserves to see ugly code.

You probably use four spaces, hey? Personally I hate four spaces. Waste of space. Two is the way it was intended to be. But I understand that other people might have different preferences. With tabs we can all be happy.

Re:Overrated

[pjt33]

Nonsense. Differing widths of tab-stops only cause problems when people mix tabs and spaces.

Re:Monaco

[psergiu]

background: black
foreground: X11:peachpuff or #99CF96
font: X11:10x20 or Monaco 12pt

That's way faster to read than anything on a bleed-your-yeys white background.

TFA is comparing 10pt Monaco with a 12pt font. Put them both at 12pt and Monaco - which is monospaced - the way God intended computer displays to be - wins.

Consolas

[Mangala]

Microsoft's Consolas with properly tweaked ClearType has been my personal favorite since its release. Another huge improvement to my code screen is changing the background color to a light grey - still not a dark color scheme, but much less glaring than pure white.

Re:Consolas

[Anonymous Coward]

Second the Consolas recommendation. One reason why I prefer fixed-width fonts is that proportional fonts reserve too little room for dots, commas, semicolons and other "narrow" characters, which happen to be of great importance in programming. Proportional fonts focus on text, while programming languages focus on structure.

Re:Monaco

[Jurily]

There are a lot of fixed width fonts specifically designed so each character is unique in appearance. That is not negotiable when programming.

oO0 il1 lilli

Pencil and Paper

[turgid]

It's the only way to write real code.

Do the studies apply?

[mattdm]

Reading prose is different from reading code. I'd think that whatever you gain wouldn't be enough to make up for the loss from lack of vertical alignment.

Additionally, which monospaced font you use matters. You need one that's designed to be readable and to make clear distinctions between 0 and O, l and 1, and so on. I use Raph Levien's Inconsolata for coding, and it's excellent (and available under the Open Font License).

On Fedora, yum install levien-inconsolata-fonts.

Re:Do the studies apply?

[TheRaven64]

You're confusing indenting with alignment. Indenting is a set of whitespace at the start of a line indicating the depth in the scope. Alignment can be anywhere, for example between variable types and their names in a structure. If you have an int element and a float element, you might put one space after float and three spaces after int, then the variable names will line up. In languages like Objective-C and Smalltalk it's common to have colons lined up in message sends that wrap more than one line. To do this, you need to be able to guarantee that the whitespace that you put in one line is the same width as the characters that you put in the other.

If your editor supports elastic tabstops, then you can use them, but then your code will look weird in something like viewvc or any editor that doesn't. This is why our coding conventions say you should use tabs for indenting and spaces for alignment. A tab is a semantic 'indent by one level' character, while a space is an 'advance the cursor by one character width' character. To have this work in a proportional font, you'd need to redefine space to mean 'advance the cursor by the width of the character directly above'. This is not impossible, but it would require a bit of hacking in the layout engine.

Not the bottleneck

[bcmm]

Speed of reading is not a bottleneck in understanding code anyway, since I am sure it is pretty uncommon to be able to understand code while reading it as fast as you would read a novel.

And there are numerous disadvantages: lack of alignment, smaller punctuation making syntax errors less visible (" '" vs "' " for example), etc., etc.

Reading prose versus editing code

[Krioni]

What I wonder about is whether the ease of reading attributed (correctly, I assume) to proportional fonts apply to prose, but not necessarily to the kinds of reading needed in programming. When I read code, I'm sometimes looking for single-character mistakes. In a case like that, a proportional font that helps form "word-pictures" might mask an error. In other words, the speed attributed to proportional fonts is for reading comprehension — translating text into thought — but might actually detract from the speed and accuracy of reading for the purpose of editing/finding mistakes.

visual cues

[pz]

Human languages have lots and lots of redundancy, such that you can often either screw up letter order, word order, or even drop entire words, and often the full meaning is clear. Visual cues in the form of paragraphs and chapters are added to help guide the reader, but removing them would not render the text entirely incomprehensible.

Computer languages are not as forgiving, and, also, lacking redundancy, far denser. Reading speed is irrelevant because of the bottleneck formed by reading comprehension. Code is rarely read in novel-like linear fashion, but, much more often, flitting from one part of the text to another, navigating through visual cues. Visual cues in the form of often richly structured layout that includes idioms not required by syntax make navigating and comprehending code possible, and removing them although would, in most languages, not change the meaning of the code, would erect a formidable barrier to comprehension. Not using these cues to the fullest to help write clear, expressive and maintainable code is being self-indulgent and shortsighted. Requiring that a particular, and perhaps unspecified font be used for best display, rather than the ubiquitous assumption of monospaced font, is mere vanity.

Remember, when code is written, it is meant not only to be converted into executable machine language, but also to be comprehensible and comprehended by other programmers, or future selves. Clarity of expression is vital.

Only if you don't use VIM

[tagattack]

VIM renders text-area as a grid. This is compatible with column-area selection, and other features it supports which frankly I use nearly daily. While I've honestly considered using proportional fonts — I've tried living without VIM, switching to Eclipse or IDEA for several months at a time to give the IDE experience a full opportunity. Doesn't work for me, so neither will proportional fonts.

Besides there seem to be more reasons not to use proportional fonts than to use them:

• Lot's of people align assignments, this will look terrible.
• Several formatting techniques (newline before curly bracket) depend on the width of whitespace.
• Occasionally code contains tabular data which is easily formatted for digestibility using fixed-width fonts.
• Occasionally, although rarely, comments may contain diagrams or ascii-art figures which would be rendered useless with proportional font.

Reasons to use them:

• You might be able to read the contents of your code up to 14% faster, if you don't run into the issues above...

Stroustrup is guilty of worse than that

[argent]

Odd. My impression after reading his book was that Stroustrup deeply misunderstood the importance of coding style. And not merely because "C++" and "style" should only be combined for humorous effect: the way "&" behaves in declarations is bizarre, and his explanation read like a rationalization for a bad decision.

Missing the Point

[Deorus]

While fixed-width might not be recommended for text, code is not exactly regular text. In a regular essay, skipping a period or a comma is usually not an issue. In code, however, it makes a world of difference, and therefore it doesn't make sense to use a font that may cause confusion between a pair of parentheses '()' and a zero '0', an 'I' and an 'l', a single dash '-' and two dashes '--', etc. Fixed-width founts are a lot clearer, and clarity and usability are extremely important for me.

Re:Dark background

[wed128]

I call foul on this.

On paper, you need the extra white to reflect as much reading light back at you as possible.

with a computer display, the light is generated behind the text, so you don't need the sheer volume of light a white background gives you. This was even more true of old CRT displays, but even an LCD backlight produces way to much light to read comfortably. Note that non-backlit displays follow the opposate convention, and really benefit from a light background.

in conclusion, go with what you're comfortable with; what do a bunch of dorks on slashdot know anyway?

Re:Monaco

[Sir_Lewk]

Um yes... its good looking.

See what I did there? "good looking" is subjective and when you act like it's not you come off as a jackass.