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Tried it here: https://monaspace.githubnext.com/

It might be nice for reading code, but for editing code it feels weird that glyphs change their size while you type.

Also readability wise I'm not convinced. In the example there is a combination like "_m_", in this case the lette m is much nicer to read. But then i typed "mml", which makes the two m's very different looking. Also the line number 10 on top of 11 looks weird.



> It might be nice for reading code, but for editing code it feels weird that glyphs change their size while you type.

Applying display typography techniques to code is an objectively bad idea for both reading and writing.

They even enable ligatures by default on the demo which is far worse. For those of us who actually have to get work done and not just fetishize code and fawn over aesthetics, it's a fundamental requirement that every single character be as unambiguous and consistent as possible.


Please stop diluting words like objectively for things that you just feel strongly about.


I suppose you've never dealt with encoding issues. Encoding issues are very common, funnily enough, when you're writing code meant to handle display text. Not just web pages, but even native apps that must support almost any language that isn't English. Not all work is lighthearted when it comes to fixing these mistakes, nor is the testing reliable. Accessibility is a huge deal and can bring about lawsuits. Really, it even has security implications. If one is this sloppy about fonts I doubt there's much validation going on elsewhere, yet injection attacks should be trivial to mitigate. Why overcomplicate this? No mere font in your editor is going to distinguish between the string literals for the user and the rest of the code being displayed to the programmer.

I'm not misusing these words for hyperbole. We're talking about text. Words like "literal" and "objective" belong here. At this stage of the game, few subjective decisions are left to tinker with in programming. I'm sorry if that sort of thing brings you joy. Get another hobby.

It's objectively bad to alter the visual presentation of font glyphs for non-functional purposes. If a programmer sees the same glyph with varying width, they have to wonder if it's the same underlying character. If a ligature is applied, they have to wonder if it's the same character being displayed. That's a huge waste of time for little to no benefit. We are very far away from these concerns being a thing of the past. The cognitive load must still sometimes fall back on human inspection. A cute font shouldn't prevent you from doing that, nor should anyone need to break out the hex editor to be sure. This simple knowledge cannot die off into obscurity yet.

If y'all want pretty code it must be done at the text encoding and compiler level (invent a new keyboard layout while you're at it!), not in the fonts... but that too would just repeat the sins of the past. :)


This ship has literally sailed, hyperbole continues to affect our language whether we want it or not.


I think it became more common, especially public communication became much stronger (politics, news, corporate communications).

In human to human communication those changes don't necessarily apply. Even the politicians that are most violent with their words in speeches are often completely "normal" once the cameras are turned off.


None of the subjective preferences here are “objective”, and the added insulting language for people who disagree makes it worse, not better.


Ligatures are great if done right. E.g. the set in Fira Code gives me a 2 character wide ≠ instead of != so it retains the monospace widths.


All "coding" ligatures in all monospace fonts work like that.


I get my work done with ligatures. That's fine for me.


I think they should adjust their rules so that when a character is next to itself, both occurrences must use the same variant.


Huh, on a linux desktop the "own voice" example just seems to change height and weight and nothing else. (Still horrible, but it just looks like it's "breathing".) On mobile (android chrome), it looked like it was changing in more dimensions, I'd almost call it "writhing". I hope "reduced animation" turns this kind of thing off (but I couldn't find the setting in chrome at a quick look...)


That seems like Chromium is trying to do some hinting, which would ideally make the glyphs fit better to pixels, but it corrupts smooth transitions.


> But then i typed "mml", which makes the two m's very different looking.

Agreed. I find this even more noticeable and distracting with narrow characters; e.g. in “llm”, one of the “l”s reads like “1” to me.


I was halfway through reading this trying to figure out if I wanted to give up my existing code ligatures, but then I hit the code ligatures section, and now I'm hooked




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