Request: enhancement the @ and & characters

[duongphuhiep]

Source: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/issues/352#issuecomment-305281078 Re-post here as @jdreesen suggestion

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It is very subjective, I think that FiraCode fonts is the most beautiful mono-fonts out there.

However I found that the "@" and "&" are a little bit confusing.

I got 2 problems with them:

1) they are not as distinguishable with the normal 'o' as other mono-fonts.

2) they stand-out too much, for example: when I read "@to_refund", I should concentrate more on the "to_refund" part, because the "@" is only a side character. But in FiraCode, the '@' usually captures my attention more than necessary.

• because I should put some effort to make sure it is not the "o"
• or because the character '@' is just "too pretty" in FiraCode

As I said, it is very subjective, maybe I'm the only one annoying with these 2 characters, and I might get used to them with time. I tried many other fonts, but I still think FiraCode is the best

Thank you for reading

[dhouck]

Several people over there thought that the @ looked bad but wasn’t a problem, several others (including me) think it actually leads to readability issues. There were comparisons with other fonts’ versions, and a large number of other suggestions, including one a lot of people liked better.

Nobody expressed the opinion that the & was worse than the @

Other images relevant to the discussion there:

• An example of the current symbol potentially blending in:
• Comparison with other fonts:
• Some alternatives:
• Some more alternatives:

[nemesit]

I personally think that the @galley or the @it with a few adjustments might be a good fit e.g. the a silhoutte in @it adjusted to fit the font or the a of @gallows in the form of the font's standard a (mainly it's bowl and spur)

[demoy]

'&' looks great to me. I have never seen a more pleasant drawing of 'Et' in another font. It also more stylisticly distinctive than the ubiquitous '&'.

[hkbakke]

I think both looks completely alien - so alien that I think that some people will not even recognize them as their intended character if not put into other textual context. Basically both are new characters, not variations of the real characters. The '@' sign is clearly the worst of course. There is a difference between 'taste' and 'new character' which is the case here. Fira Mono looks so good so I find it incredibly hard to understand why the obviously very capable creator(s) suddenly created those two characters which looks totally out of place.

[j-f1]

If you use Fira Code, which is based on Fira Mono, you can enable ss03 and ss05 to get conventional @ and & characters.

[hkbakke]

I do use Fira Code but I can't set stylistic sets in my terminal application. Even in other software it seems like it is not possible to enable several at once for all text. I don't know if that is just a limitation in the application (tested in Word 2016) but it looked to me like I would have to select the ss per selection, not globally, if I needed more than one ss.

There is probably no hope that those will be new default, as you are trading appeal to new users, with potentially annoyed existing users that have gotten used to the Fira-specific versions. What I suggest as the next-best solution would be to make an extra release that have those characters "in the normal" versions by default. Even if that could be said for any combination of ss-versions, I think that specific combination is what most people want.

[dhouck]

I don't know where to find one (other than "ask Google"), but I am fairly sure there are websites where you can upload a font and then choose which stylistic sets or whatever you want and download a version with those set, so that we don't need a combinatorial explosion of potential fonts each release.

[alexeyten]

Check this one https://github.com/twardoch/fonttools-utils/tree/master/pyftfeatfreeze