Programming

Average website experience in 2023

That's just modern web dev

It's basically a different type of ligature - it is standard to OTF fonts, but requires ligature support in your editor/terminal. Just need to enable ligatures and/or enable specific ligature sets. See https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace#editors or maybe https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/font-shaping.html for the general procedure in a supporting terminal.

Texture healing works by finding each pair of adjacent characters where one wants more space, and one has too much. Narrow characters are swapped for ones that cede some of their whitespace, and wider characters are swapped for ones that extend to the very edge of their box. This swapping is powered by an OpenType feature called “contextual alternates,” which is widely supported by both operating systems and browser engines.

Contextual alternates are normally used for certain scripts, like Arabic, where the shape of each glyph depends on the surrounding glyphs. And they are also used for cursive handwriting fonts where the stroke of the “pen” might have different connection points across letters. Texture healing is a novel application of this technology to code.

basically fonts were already capable of using alternate versions of characters based on their nearby characters, so they used that for these fonts to allow for seemingly-dynamic sizing/spacing

It's an OpenType standard feature but the font rendering system has to support it and the app has to enable it. The page has a link to instructions for enabling it in VS Code but I have no idea about support status on different OS and desktop environments. I could see it working on webview on Android fwiw, I'm guessing it's either well supported in general or at least by browsers.

Here's your code example in the editor. I don't personally think the difference between the 'm's is super noticable. But what did strike me a lot more is the difference in height between the two 'i's in the first line. I think that difference is pretty bad.

They would still line up, wouldn't they? Or am I misunderstanding how the texture healing would work... Would they not take the same total amount of space?

You'd think after that page of "texture healing", alignment, etc. etc., Microsoft would actually make a fully, complete font first and foremost...

not sure about escape sequences just yet, but Kitty gives you insane control over font rendering https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/#fonts

That's actually a really cool idea. Now I hope this too!

I used to use Fira Code, but my new personal favorite is MonoLisa

I'm not sure I'd consider that "failing". At first glance, I don't mind the distinct "m" glyphs being juxtaposed. But perhaps I'd find it annoying after a while.

I've long preferred proportional fonts and positional tab stops like what you find in a WYSIWYG word processor. Got a tab position wrong? Drag it as appropriate or, if necessary, add a new one. In fact, during a period where I was doing far more writing than programming, in the days before code completion, I preferred my WYSIWYG word processor to my code editor. I had appropriate scripts and macros for cleaning up imported text files and to always save both native format and a text file with spaces in place of tabs. I also had different templates for different languages so that I could have custom processing for different languages. (It helps that a big part of that job was teaching people how to use word processors as far more than just electronic typewriters.)

Now, of course, the programmer's editor is an advanced tool tailored to the job, making it lunacy to even consider a word processor as code editor. Which doesn't mean that there aren't word processing concepts that might be valuable.

Nick Gravgaard has some good writing on the subject and links to a variety of resources, including to at least one proportional font designed for programming.

Yeah texture healing is poorly thought out and will break way more things than it "fixes". If your font needs that, go in and fix the damn font. A solution to a problem no one asked for, thanks Microsoft!

Radon, the "handwriting" one, seems like if someone wanted to have Comic Sans but for code.

I don't think the intention is that Copilot voice would be animated, I think they just had a dumb idea to highlight it that way in the demo. Look closely, and you'll see the Copilot voice is the only text there written in the "Krypton" font. The animation indeed looks godawful.

There's Iosevka Extended