[celoyd]

I’m a nerd who’s done some typography, and I hate monospace. The distinctive thing here is that nerds are about language, and the good linguistic interfaces to the machine are mainly monospaced just by historical accident. It’s not like we’d invent it over again if we hadn’t thought of it until now.

Now that it’s established, of course, we’re all pretty much locked in. Most of the text on my screen right now is monospaced. I mean, good luck writing code in a proportional font: pretty much every language and text editor assumes you can align with spaces, tiny punctuation looks huge, etc.

But saying that monospace is inherently nerdy is like saying that, say, slashes are inherently path separators.

[thaumaturgy]

Depends on the kind of nerd. I wish I were a typography nerd, it's one of my weaknesses. On the other hand, I actually have written more than my fair share of COBOL74 on an old greenscreen, and if I had to do that in a beautiful typographical font, I would have killed someone.

Monospace isn't entirely an accident.

[celoyd]

Sure, I guess “accident” is a vague way of putting it. I mean monospace sucks, but it sucked in a way that people could take advantage of until they relied on it. Now that we have ncurses, it’s hard to call it an accident.

I could complain the same way about practically anything. Cement. Unix. C. The genitive absolute. But granted that great things are made out of hacks, some hacks are uglier than others, and monospace is pretty darn ugly.

[donaq]

Uh, what sucks about Unix and C? I don't think they suck at all.

[nrr]

Everything sucks, but Unix and C certainly don't suck less. I'd rather stab myself in the eyes with rusted forks than profess my love for either.

C is an overgrown assembly language, and Unix doesn't have enough kitchen sinkery going on to make all of the tiny programs that do one thing well even marginally useful.

[IsaacSchlueter]

In my Windows days, I used SciTE, and coded all day long in Tahoma. It was a dream. I think it also shaped a big part of why I don't ever try to "line up" code with spaces, favoring logical indentation with tabs instead.

iTerm and TextMate can't handle variable-width fonts, which makes me sad. At least I get my pointy serifs with CentSchBook Mono, though.