This is the archived version of Roland Weigelt's weblog that ran from 2003 to 2023 at weblogs.asp.net

PDC 05: Monospaced fonts everywhere :-(

In the sessions I’ve been so far, each time code is shown on the screen, it’s in some monospaced font. Either “Lucida Console” (which is kind of ok), or worse “Courier New” (by the way: am I really the only person on the planet to notice that this font doesn’t scale well? It sucks on high-resolution laser printers, and it’s not that great on-screen in sizes larger than say 12pt).

Anyway, if we’d still be programming with C-style function names, I wouldn’t complain. But now that Microsoft advocates long identifier names for years, and the Framework libraries making heavy use of long and descriptive names (and I’m all for that!), why is it that everybody still thinks that code needs to be in monospaced font, even if it means that some identifier names span several meters on the projection screens?

1 Comment

  • I've been coding in proportional fonts for years, usually Verdana 8 on the PC and "I-forget-what" on the Mac. It's SO much more pleasant than using a chunky monospace font.



    I really don't know why monospace is the default anymore, given that we're not writing COBOL or FOTRAN.



    In fact, I wish Visual Studio (and others) took visual formatting even further: being able to visually line up variable types and names at the top of a function WITHOUT having to tab align them; have all the types be left aligned and then all the variable names be left aligned somewhere to the right of the type names.



    Or doing something funky to make function signatures more readable.



    Or support some level of WYSIWYG in C# triple-slash comment blocks.

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