In practice this is unusable. Because the width of the letters now depends on the succeeding character, the text jumps as you write it. Super annoying.
Cool for reading. Awful for writing.
!= is two bloody characters not one.
And now people are doing it for 3 characters.
With this kind of thing, you get all the text editing idiocy of combining characters (like emojis) for no benefit at all.
See: Text Editing Hates You Too https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/
for anyone unaware, Marvin Gaye - Sexual Healing https://youtu.be/fn4i8bAfnMY
In addition to ligatures, you get IMO a better version of the "Mix & Match" idea: doc comments are rendered as normal proportional text.
Edit and OT: Interesting HN algorithm behavior: I just wrote two posts in this thread (on different topics). The first appeared at the top of the page, as usual for new comments. When I clicked "Submit" on the second one, it appeared below the first one. My guess is that it was because it's much shorter. (First comment: >>38213113 )
% ttfmono MonaspaceArgon-Regular.otf
monospaced flag = 0
(0 = variable-width, otherwise = monospaced)
I was able to see ligatures and text healing in vim running in a patched st* though. I really like it thanks! The text healing only moves the line subtly as I type and when I cursor over there are no droppings from the widened 'm' for example. It's well thought-out for code.
If I could ask for a feature it would be to select some variants, like angular 0 with reverse slash or to leave the ! in the != ligature. To see what I mean: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/blob/main/doc/stylistic-...
> If you want coding ligatures but do not want texture healing, you can elide the calt setting:
> Here’s a concrete example of the mess that it is: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSgIEDMekSg&t=157>. He says, “so we can write an if statement, so we can say ‘if want is not equal to got’”, with the character `!` briefly visible on screen, then a ≠. Fortunately he was aware enough to put text over the video “I’m using the ‘Fira Code’ font, which shows ‘!=’ in this neat way. Try it!”, so the beginner (since this is designed for beginners) at least gets some hint—but I bet that more than a few will forget and find it difficult to figure out what it is again, and anyone that’s skimming may just miss that part altogether.
In education material in particular, coding ligatures are emphatically not OK. How on earth is the user supposed to figure out that that wide ≠ is actually typed !=? So you’re putting a stumbling-block in their path.
I have recommended this many times here, but I use a proportional coding font: Input Sans
For others, this is ligatures https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/glossary/ligature
[0] http://eastfarthing.com/luculent/
[1] https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/luculent (live example in browser)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterism_(typography)
Edit: it’s called an Asterism
I was on a quest to find the narrowest font and Quinze was the answer. It's something like 20% narrower than Iosevka and M+. I can't find an easy comparison with PragmataPro but if Iosevka is a free interpretation of PragmataPro like you mentioned then Quinze should be narrower as well.
In fact Quinze is so narrow that when I attempted to force its use in all monospace text in the browser, readability took a hit instead of improving. This is because at the same height it is much smaller than "normal" fonts. In my coding setup I use a huge font size which works great with the narrow width.
I guess the downside is that Quinze is very minimal: pretty much only ASCII, no ligature, no customization etc. None of those bother me.
Here is a screenshot of Iosevka Comfy in action: https://share.combo.cc/-bN9f8hAiiG
and Iosevka Comfy Motion, with tasteful serifs: https://share.combo.cc/-BNHfhV4zgu
I have to explicitly set the "Show all fonts" checkbox which shows all "non monospaced" fonts.
• The design of Computer Modern was based on Monotype Modern 8A, which was made by a "real typographer" for Monotype corporation and used for decades in several textbooks by Addison-Wesley, including the first editions of TAOCP volumes 1–3 (and 2nd ed of vol 1).
• Knuth got close feedback on the font specimens at various steps of the process (and incorporated the suggestions) from many of the world's top font designers, in particular Hermann Zapf, Matthew Carter, Richard Southall, Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, who between them are behind such typefaces as Palatino, Optima, Verdana, Georgia, and Lucida. (Zapf and Southall visited Knuth at Stanford and spent weeks working closely with him on the fonts.) I imagine they wouldn't have spent so much time on it if they thought it was "garbage".
• Of course, Computer Modern, and Monotype Modern before it, are (intentionally) boring "workhorse" fonts for textbooks and won't win any points for being stylish or novel or a work of typographic genius — but within that category, CM is AFAICT something close to the best possible rendering of the basic design, very far from "garbage". I'm curious who thinks otherwise. (I've read a few reviews from typographers and no one said the font was bad; one I remember praised the even "texture" of the page, though that was more a result of TeX's Knuth–Plass line-breaking rather than the font itself.)
• (There is also a well-known issue with CM's appearance on low-resolution devices like computer screens rather than print, and especially the "spindly" appearance of the vector font that usually ends up getting used today if one asks for Computer Modern—see my answer at https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722 and links in the comments on it—but those have nothing to do with Knuth's design; in fact Knuth personally still uses the Metafont-generated bitmap fonts unlike everyone else. And there are now "newcomputermodern" and "mlmodern" to remedy this.)
Code can be aligned with elastic tabstops ( https://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/ ) or virtual formatting (that things are aligned according to syntax regardless of whitespace).
Things to align in terminals are mostly tables, and they could be rendered as tables if the terminal supporting that knew that they are tables. Nushell natively supports tabular data structures, so rendering them as proper tables would need just one change – the table renderer.
