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

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.

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.

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...

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?