[j2kun]

> You want a good Markdown viewer more than you think you do.

> monospaced and thus fatiguing to read.

Monospaced text is fine. I don't see how people who read code (and code comments) all day care that strongly about this. Plaintext is king

[tptacek]

There's a reason we're not reading monospaced here, and a reason we do read monospaced code.

But the beauty of this moment is that if you want a really good SwiftUI monospaced Markdown reader, you can have it before dinner. This is exactly what I'm talking about. You have an idiosyncratic personal preference, and it's now reasonable to expect software to shrink-wrap around that preference.

[j2kun]

Generally I just don't appreciate when someone jumps from "I care about this" to "everyone cares about this for obvious reasons." Focus on what something means to you, and being sincere about it. But that is just my advice for writing, take it or leave it.

Also, are browser text area inputs monospaced by default for everyone? Or did I configure that for myself long ago and forget? If it's not just me, maybe the "reasons" you're alluding to are not so obvious. Anyway, I have no trouble at all reading the long comments I type into text areas.

And more power to people for embracing agency :)

[userbinator]

There's a reason we're not reading monospaced here

You underestimate the number of HN users who are reading this site in their terminal. ;-)

[elch]

I get 429s all the time trying to read this site in lynx or any non-mainstream browser (w/o JS).

[tptacek]

I'm genuinely surprised by the monospace cheering section!

[minikomi]

Hello from eww

[applfanboysbgon]

> a reason we're not reading monospaced here

Legacy decisions as a remnant from a time when taking more space on paper cost pages and therefore resources, remaining as a default from centuries of inertia in how text is printed?

[tptacek]

No, prose set in monospace is harder to read. The "legacy" is monospace! We went way out of our way to to get proportional typesetting working.

But seriously: you do you. There are people who code in proportional typefaces and they're as baffling to me as you are right now. Let a thousand Markdown viewers bloom.

[applfanboysbgon]

> The "legacy" is monospace! We went way out of our way to to get proportional typesetting working.

The legacy is proportional, at least in Latin script and its ancestors. Handwriting was proportional, of course, and so was Gutenberg's printing press. Books and newspapers have virtually always been printed in proportional type.

In Chinese and Japanese, monospace is legacy in both handwriting and print... and also still universally used today. All Chinese and Japanese text is monospaced by default. Billions of people are getting by just fine reading monospaced prose.

I don't really know where this conception that monospaced is somehow objectively harder to read is coming from. Actually, this is the first I've ever heard of the complaint. I can't help but wonder if you've been subjected to some very bad monospaced fonts in prose or something.

[mrob]

Monospace text is objectively less dense, which means you have to move your eyes more. Every eye movement is an opportunity for error. Monospace text only makes sense when seeing exact character counts matters (which it often does in computer code).

[applfanboysbgon]

One could argue that less density, as well as standardised widths, significantly reduces opportunity for error compared to cluttered text that is constantly varying how it is displayed. Perhaps moving your eyes more increases opportunity for error by 10% but easier-to-parse characters decreases the opportunity for error by 20%?

[richiebful1]

There's limited research on readability of monospaced font. But this study suggests monospace is weakly more readable than variable-width font:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/2897736

[layer8]

Turn off syntax highlighting for your code, translate it to COBOL, and pass it through a formatter that converts it to continuous word-wrapped text. Then we’ll talk again.

[j2kun]

I have written multiple books entirely in LaTeX edited with neovim. So... your point is not taken.

[tptacek]

I'm a fan of your writing, all the more because you've somehow managed to do all of it in monospace. :)

[layer8]

Authoring is different from reading.

And why did you author them in LaTeX if you think reading in monospace plaintext is fine for everyone?

[kanbankaren]

Surprised that Monaspace hasn't been mentioned below.

https://monaspace.githubnext.com/

[jsw97]

There is a real use case for a viewer if you have a lot of formulas. Yes you can read the raw latex but you go cross-eyed after a while. Maybe I am a softie though.

[j2kun]

I agree, but I don't think the author of this blog post is coming from that perspective, and markdown renderers of the sort described in the post tend to do pretty poorly with math typesetting.

[jrm4]

Nothing personal but I hate this take with a passion, and I literally think it's representative of the worst attitude in computing because it's the literal opposite of software SHOULD BE.

The whole entire point of computers in their best light is changeable software, the whole point should be "let people read how they want to."

[il-b]

The dislike of code per se is what drives these people to use agents in the first place.