ClintGoss
commented
1 year ago I spent quite a bit to time exploring the opportunities and issues relating to programming fonts. Some of the major issues are the most mundane - line height seems to be one of the most important issues (for me, at least) in terms of readability in a typical character-oriented display. I did experiment with limited proportionality - using double-wide for the obvious Kanji and Balinese scripts and 1.5-wide characters for many characters that could really use expansion.
Honestly, the thing that discouraged me is that most of my personal friends who are life-long programmers gave me the "Fonts? Who Cares?" reaction. I suspect that, like background noise in a restaurant, we may not be aware of it, but it does have a significant impact on our productivity and stress-level. However, portability of code across many different programming environments is part of the landscape, and writing code in a proportional font environment would render as so "messed up" formatting wise when it eventually winds up in a fixed-pitch environment that I fear it may be counter-productive.
The [Input] font is cool ... thanks for that ...
jmi2k
There are some contrarians (e.g: me at least) out there who really want to try using proportional fonts in a programming environment. The major problem with proportional fonts is that the spacing and symbols are optimized for the most common use case: human texts. I think it might be interesting to provide alternative versions of those (symbols, spaces, 0/O, 1/I/L/l) for that specific use case. An example of a proportional, dev-oriented font is Input.
Why I'd want this font specifically to support it? Two main reasons: it has an impressive Unicode coverage and it has a semi-serif variant which I particularly appreciate.