> Bravo Apple. I'd love to see what they have in store for designers and programmers next.
What would you say the programmers specifically need though. A laptop instead of a workstation?
What would you say the programmers specifically need though. A laptop instead of a workstation?
I am trying to imagine what a page of code laid out by a professional designer would look like and I can hear a million programmers screaming bloody murder in my head about the thoughtful use of whitespace, proportional-width fonts (even though they are ones chosen to clearly differentiate between confusing characters like 1/I and 0/O), and the occasional change in font size for... what is the source code equivalent of a subhead, anyway? Comments?
There are beautiful programmer fonts nowadays that look amazing on Apple's high resolution screens.
There are several GUIs for Vim/Neovim that take advantage of the GPU and the text rendering abilities of modern computers in general and Macs in particular [1].
And once you get used to seeing your code this way, it's hard to go back.
You'll probably love this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06030
Nicolas Rougier has also implemented a few of those ideas in a series of packages for Emacs called "NANO Emacs"; the actual implementation goes beyond what's discussed in the paper and is worth checking out.
I love the exploratory screenshot of a function reformatted with the comments floating on the left of a hairline instead of next to the source, with the function name nice and big and bold right next to the version control info.
BTW, Nicolas has a lot of interesting packages exploring use of graphical design elements in Emacs apart from the Nano Emacs stuff; for example, there's https://github.com/rougier/svg-tag-mode. I love how he chooses to represent dates and dates with times attached, and to distinguish active vs. inactive dates with shading rather than "[" and "<". That actually makes it easier to spot a common org-mode mistake without having to call up the agenda.