[akrito]

Scintilla-based editors, GTKsourceview-based editors (I just tried with Scite and Gedit) and Emacs all correctly position the cursor when using the arrow keys and proportional fonts.

As for lining up similar constructs, I mostly code in Python, and the PEP 8 style guidelines explicitly forbid that.

[jrockway]

I tried it in Emacs. Your definition of correct does not agree with mine.

If you draw a line parallel to the left-hand edge of your monitor down from the character that the cursor is currently over, it should touch the character that "next-line" will move to. That is not what happens when you use a proportional font in Emacs. (If you are on the 10th character of the line, you will move to the 10th character of the next line.)

What happens makes mathematical sense, but Emacs is a visual editor. Programmed text editing is nice, but sometimes you notice a visual property of the source code, and would like to exploit that instead of some lexical property. Visual editing lets you do this, but proportional fonts destroy this ability.

Anyway, sorry to hear about the Python style guidelines. If I did Python, I would ignore that one. (Haskell is whitespace-sensitive and allows you to align similar constructs. So this is just a Python thing.)

[akrito]

> I tried it in Emacs. Your definition of correct does not agree with mine.

Yes it does. In Emacs, with a proportional font, if I'm on the 10th character of a line and press "up", I do not necessarily move to the 10th character of the previous line. I move to the character visually above the current one.

Sorry it doesn't work for you - we must have differing Emacs setups. I'm using Emacs 23 in GUI mode.

Also, I'm a big fan of Haskell in general, but sometimes when I'm coding I think its whitespace is a bit too significant.

[jrockway]

Me too. I did "set-buffer-face" to "variable-pitch".