One naive way to do this would be to create ligature pairs for difficult pairs (mi, lm, etc). But instead, they seem to be selecting character alternates that fill the fixed width differently based on their surroundings.
As far as I can tell from the demo, these pairs currently aren't affected by texture healing, and they look a little awkward in Radon especially.
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.
[append] Oh, I do see some jumping when I type "optimized". Honestly, it doesn't seem very jarring to me; the jumping is always right where the edit point is so the added or removed letter causes a much bigger jump.
But even without anything like that, if it’s good for reading I like to use different fonts when reviewing and writing code to help with the context-switch, so I think this could be useful to me. And I guess people in regions where a single keystroke isn’t always a single character such as Korea, China, Japan and the arab world might be used to the jarring effect already?
I feel at least partially the same about fancy ligatures; we could just use the actual characters in source code, Unicode is widely supported. Raku does that, but it would need better typesetting (with variable-width fonts) to really shine.
It sometimes breaks out of the grid, but there still is a grid. Things are sometimes not micro-aligned but still macro-aligned, and that matters (to me).
Why do we keep using fixed-width fonts? Because a lot of stuff has been written that depends on a columnar grid. Most notably, terminals are absolutely predicated on it and fundamentally cannot support any other mode of operation.
To begin with: visual alignment, ASCII art, diagrams using box-drawing characters, &c., both in code and in the output of diverse tools:
def function_name(and_long_parameter_list,
so_that_it_wraps="like so"):
pass
ABC_D = 1 # Explanation
ABC_EFG = 2.0 # Another one
ABC_HI = 34 # A third one
┌────────┬─────────────┐
│ Tables │ Using │
┝━━━━━━━━┿━━━━━━━━━━━━━┥
│ Cell │ Box-drawing │
│ Cello │ characters │
│ Viola │ ⋮ │
│ Voilà │ │
└────────┴─────────────┘
error: cannot find macro `behold` in this scope
--> <anon>:1:13
|
1 | fn main() { behold!() }
| ^^^^^^
$ ls -la
total 43210
drwxr-xr-x 17 root root 4096 Jan 1 23:45 .
drwxr-xr-x 17 root root 4096 Jan 1 23:45 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Feb 29 2020 bin -> usr/bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Dec 31 23:59 boot
⋮
Terminals are also built on columnar behaviour; there are escape codes for moving the cursor to such-and-such a line and column, for example, and things like a side-by-side split require columnar behaviour.
Text editors can go non-monospaced, but it breaks various content for the reasons discussed, and you’ll need monospace for any terminal because loads of stuff will break otherwise, so combined with inertia, even editors that support proportional fonts aren’t often used that way if they default to monospace.
(Me, I’d rather like to use a proportional font while editing, but I’m not moving off Vim for it, so I’ll probably never get it. But for presentation, I like to go at least partially proportional with the monospace font Triplicate’s Poly variant, which breaks strict monospaceness, widening characters like w/m/W/M and narrowing characters like i/j/l/1. As for what Monaspace’s texture healing, I like it most of the time, but am not sold on cases like some_function_w_, where the last two underscores are markedly shorter than the first and it feels unbalanced.)
The text editor widget on their page is a bunch of "line" divs with individual terms being inside spans. If you add an inline style of
font-feature-settings: "calt" off;
font-feature-settings: "calt" off,"dlig" var(--ligatures,1),"ss01" var(--ligatures,1),"ss02" var(--ligatures,1),"ss03" var(--ligatures,1),"ss04" var(--ligatures,1),"ss05" var(--ligatures,1),"ss06" var(--ligatures,1),"ss07" var(--ligatures,1),"ss08" var(--ligatures,1);
It might be ok but there is a reason why type designers make every character to be the same and try to balance everything including spacing.
Monospaced fonts designs are dictated exactly by that limit of fixed character+fixed space.
But maybe the “healing” might not be verydistracting.
If the editor “repaints” commit mono on the letter-pair boundary, I could see that being a very jumpy UX — ie: the letter I just typed is moving by a few pixels. But if that repaint happens on the word boundary it might be less noticeable?
In either case, a transition could be helpful for commit mono and/or Monaspace. (But agreed with above comments that Monaspace is more subtle because it spreads the spacing over the entire word, so maybe the transition is not actually percievable or worth it). :)
But also, since I'm writing a character stream, I care about being able to see it as a monotonic stream of distinct characters (which is why I hate hate hate ligatures for e.g. "!=") and moving characters a tiny bit doesn't break that.
But this was designed by type designers. So you can make exactly the same argument about texture healing.
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.