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Comment by longwave | Hacker News Reader

Amazed that Dennis Ritchie used a non-monospace font, I don't think I have seen any other serious developer use one.

Also amused to see the Jerkcity comic open in Jordan Hubbard's screenshot.

I've tried it a few times, but it's just so painful when you want things to align. Now, if you had a really good code layout tool that could 'snap' parts of lines so that they horizontally align at sensible places, I think non-monospace fonts could be useful.

In fact, having smart alignment would be great even with monospace fonts. I work in emacs and it's frustrating when the editor decides to 'fix' your own spacing because the editor-mode doesn't have a very intelligent layout system...

> having smart alignment would be great even with monospace fonts.

The "smart" magic you are looking for is called "tabs".

And they will fight you every step of the way, every time you suggest they use the indentation character for indentation.

http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/

I recommend clang-format : http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html

Your indentation levels will show up correctly, and that's really all that matters. Relax. Or, if you really care, switch to Go and use gofmt.

If you ask really serious .. I dont think any serious developer gives a shit about font being used . Back in the days people used to be happy even to see a character on screen . These days js script writer using bower and other similar things and calling it automation will never understand that. The rush or high of using sun , bare bone x11 linux , developing without any autocomplete , when your experience was your stack overflow .

So please dont talk about serious developer font , its highly offending to all the work.

Well, except for the Lyx and KDE founder, Matthias Ettrich, who calls out his use of proportional fonts in his email on that very page!

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