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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?"
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.
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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.
MS Comic Sans is simply the best. My code doesn't have bugs, it has bloopers and out-takes.
... /. had a thread very similar to this.
And there were a lot of valuable inputs, like
* 1. Make sure that the font's period (.) sign and the comman (,) sign is BIG, to aid in the debugging process.
* 2. Color of the font and background must also complement each others. Too much contrast hurts the eyes. Too little will blur them up and make it hard to see.
There are many other very useful pointers in that thread. If anyone can dig that thread up it would be very very useful for the new crop of programmers.
Monaco is one of them. 0 is slashed and 1, l, I and | are unique.
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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.
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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:
Reasons to use them:
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?