[Stratoscope]

Wow, I never thought I would see proportional fonts specifically designed for coding. I've coded almost exclusively in proportional fonts for over ten years. The font I use the most is Georgia. It makes code easier to read and more pleasing to the eye, just like any other text.

Besides personal preference, I think there are two main reasons people avoid proportional fonts: column alignment and two-space indents.

Two-space indents are an unfortunate trend in coding styles, because they practically mandate the use of a monospaced font to see the indentation. I use tabs for indentation, which let each developer adjust the visual indentation to suit their own eyes. Four-space indents are OK too.

I would love to see programmer's editors provide a way to control the amount of visual indentation that each leading space represents.

Column alignment of course is not possible with proportional fonts, but that's an easy problem to solve: don't do it. Instead of this:

  void DoSomethingWithStuff(SomeReallyFancyTypeName thing,
                            string                  name
                            int                     count,
                            bool                    condition);

Write this:

  void DoSomethingWithStuff(
      SomeReallyFancyTypeName thing,
      string name
      int count,
      bool condition
  );

While you lose the advantage of seeing all the parameter names lined up, it becomes much easier to visually associate each name with its type. My eyes tend to wander when I have to scan across a wide horizontal gap to match things up.

This style also leads to much shorter line lengths as can be seen here, and it's easier to maintain: You don't have to realign things when you change the length of the function name or one of the type names, or when you add a parameter with a longer name than the ones you have already.

A case where column alignment is more useful is ASCII art in comments. I've experimented with using a monospaced font for comments and proportional for code, which solves that problem nicely. But I don't use ASCII art much myself, so I went back to proportional for everything.

I'm looking forward to trying out these fonts!

[drivingmenuts]

I would say that the problem is "SomeReallyFancyTypeName" where you've created a ridiculously long type name (one of the reasons I avoid Windows programming at all costs).

That aside, editors don't handle tabbing very well. It's far more space-efficient to insert two tabs instead of 8 spaces, but space and bandwidth are so cheap these days, no one can be arsed to fix what is viewed as a minor problem (use enough spaces and sooner or later, we're talking real bandwidth).

Then, there's the moment where we have to decide what those all those tabs (and sometimes spaces) mean, depending on the language, the layout rules, personal preferences, etc. For example, some people write Python with 2 spaces at the beginning of a line (which is plainly heresy). Others write it with 4 spaces (which is damnable blasphemy). Which is right?

And how many other languages are like this?(hint: any language in which layout is indented for any reason)

And concerning line length - what's the maximum allowable length before wrapping? You say 80, I say 132 (sometimes more), but I run terminal in a full-screen mode with 13-pt type, single-screened, never side-by-side.

Personally, I've learned my lesson. I'm waiting for editors to smarten up before I muck around with proportional fonts for code. Again.

[Stratoscope]

Thanks for the comments. You're right, "SomeReallyFancyTypeName" was a bit of a strawman on my part. But even with shorter type names you still have the same problems if you use column alignment. I actually gave up column alignment long before I started using a proportional font. I just found it to cause more headaches than it was worth.

You mentioned that "editors don't handle tabbing very well". All the editors I use most frequently - IntelliJ IDE, Visual Studio, MonoDevelop, Komodo, Sublime Text, UltraEdit - handle both tabs and proportional fonts without any problem, so that hasn't been an issue for me. I'm curious to know what editors have trouble with tabs.

Anyway, I try not to worry too much about tabs vs. spaces. My only real objection is two-space indents. That's just not enough for many people including myself.

Of course many editors don't support proportional fonts, but that doesn't cause a problem for those of us who like to use proportional fonts in the editors that support them. It's really easy to write code that is equally readable in a monospaced or proportional font.

Regarding the line lengths, my coding style lends itself to very short line lengths, as shown in the example above. I think that helps give some freedom to use wider indentation.

[drivingmenuts]

This (http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/) is smart tab handling. All other editor aren't that great, compared to this.