Why use monospace fonts in your IDE? [closed]

Answer 1

One thing I keep seeing in here is discussion of "lining up code" and indentation. I would like to point the following things out:

• eight spaces will always be twice as long as four spaces in any font.
• two tabs will always be twice as long as one tab in any font.
• any identifier on one line will always be the same width on the next line...in any font!
• sure, if your teammates are using monospace and you're not, it'll look different...but you should be standardizing on something--whatever it is--and if that's true then it'll look the same for everyone...in ANY font! For laughs you could also try keeping everyone on monospace and giving half of them widescreen monitors...see how that goes.
• If you're doing anything that relies on lining up code based on the columnar position of those characters on the screen, and not the scope of the identifiers you're using, I pose that what you're doing is a hack. Identifiers should never be constrained to a certain number of characters at the cost of the quality of their names. Aside from that...you're not still drawing ASCII boxes with asterisks for comments in your code, are you?

So drawing all of this together, if you start each line at the same place, and consistent spacing is the same width, and the identifiers don't spontaneously change width on each line, then your code actually WILL line up! ...until something is different.

for example:

identifier.Method().Property.ToString();
identifier.Method().OtherGuy.ToString(); //how lined up and pretty!
identifier.Method().Sumthing.YouGetThePoint;

• identifier.Method().Property.ToString();
• identifier.Method().OtherGuy.ToString(); //oh no! misaligned!
• identifier.Method().Sumthing.YouGetThePoint; //...but who cares? they're different properties!

The one point I'll concede is that non-alphanumeric characters are typically not very wide; these include )(][}{,:|";',`! and . This however could be fixed in a font editor...simply by making them wider. It's not a problem inherent with non-monospace; there just hasn't been a lot of demand for it, and so it hasn't been done yet.

In summary, personal preference is fine, but I think there's little practical reason to prefer monospace over non-monospace. You like the look of it? Sure, do monospace. You want more stuff to fit on your screen? Go non-mono. But the way people treat non-monospace like heresy is a little overblown.

Answer 2

I've become curious by this thread because many arguments for monospaced fonts can really be rebutted easily with some tweaking. So I switched my IDE to Calibri (because it has a nice, round face and is optimized for readability on screens for UI – perfect). Now I obviously have to use tabs instead spaces for indentation (ignoring all the problems) and 4 spaces width is clearly not enough so I switched to 10.

Looks quite good now. However, there are a few obvious problems that I could spot. More might surface later, after I've tested this settings for a while.

• As already mentioned, some characters (especially parenthesises, semi-colons) look much too thin. I want this in a continuous text but not in a source code. I think this will be the biggest problem.

• Symbols don't align well. As an example, consider the following C# code:

  var expr = x => x + 1;
  

  The arrow (=>) looks like a unit in about any monospace font. It looks like two adjacent characters in other fonts. The same is true for operators like >> etc.

• Spaces look tiny. I space my source codes vigorously to enhance readability. This comes to naught when switching to a proportional font. If I could control the width of spaces this would definitely help.

• Context-sensitive indentation is completely broken: in some contexts it's not enough to indentate a fixed number of tabs. Take LINQ expressions which might be indented in the following way:

  var r = from c in "This, apparently, is a test!"
          where !char.IsPunctuation(c)
          select char.ToUpper(c);
  

  You simply can't do this with a proportional font.

All in all, characters are too narrow. Again, an additional letter-spacing might help and it's definitely necessary in the case of punctiuation. However, I've got the feeling that all this tweaking to make proportional fonts more readable would just emulate what monospaced fonts to naturally. It's certainly true for all the points mentioned so far.

Answer 3

By the nature of code rather than regular language, it's nicer to have it lined up correctly. Also, in code editing, sometimes you want to block select, block copy and block paste. In Visual Studio, you can do the block selection by using the ALT key while doing your mouse selection. It might be different in different editors, but I've always found that option in an editor very important in some cases, and it wouldn't work very well, unless you are using a mono-spaced font.

Answer 4

All it takes is a few hours of trying to figure out why a search isn't finding something because you have 2 spaces instead of 1 in your literal, to realize you should use Monospace fonts. I had this happen to me once when trying to fix a Lotus Notes agent, when the designer wasn't using a monospace font. It wasn't until I pasted the code into CodeWright to print it out that it was obvious what the problem was.

Answer 5

I like to line up related conditionals, to try to make it more obvious that they are grouped. For example:

if ((var1 == FOO) && ((var2 == BAR) ||
                      (var2 == FOOBAR)))

Variable width fonts make this more difficult.

Answer 6

I suspect monospaced fonts were a programmer's preference as a carry-over from the text-based DOS days.

On the other hand, I, myself, have tried Verdana and a couple other recommended proportional fonts, but I couldn't deal with the change. My eye is too well trained for monospace. Languages heavy on symbols, like: C/C++, C#, Perl, etc., look too different for me. The placement of symbols makes the code look completely different.