I switched to coding in a proportional font, Verdana, a couple of years ago and never looked back.
That's the font you are reading this comment in, in fact.
Code is mostly words and words are much easier to read in a proportional font. Symbols are plenty clear enough in Verdana, all letters are distinguishable, and I don't use mid-line alignment so I don't see the point in a monospace font outside of the terminal.
I'm confused. In every modern language I've used apart from go and terraform, only leading indentation matters and autoformatters do not apply mid-line alignment or align subsequent lines against characters in a previous line.
edit: and maybe Haskell? the layout rules are complicated
personally I don't think lining up e.g. variable or parameter names in c style declarations improves readability at all, and it pollutes git diffs.
but I do use a monospace font in the terminal because many command line applications align their output into columns using spaces.
Good point, it is usually the leading indentation that matters most. I guess since I use Clojure mostly, I like to be able to line up pairs in a map, or a let binding. This could potentially be achieved with tabs, but I'm a spaces guy so I think variable-spaced fonts would be problematic.
> but I do use a monospace font in the terminal because many command line applications align their output into columns using spaces
> That's the font you are reading this comment in, in fact.
Wrong. One of my favorite features of Firefox is that I get to choose whether websites can override my fonts. And they can't. Serifed Georgia is default, Ariel if they request sans-serif, and Consolas for monospace.
Yes. I just reloaded the Dev Fonts page with and without locked fonts and it only downloads them when the fonts are unlocked.
I forgot to mention that one may also set a minimum font size. That one does occasionally break a layout here or there, but it's worth it for easier reading.
That's the font you are reading this comment in, in fact.
Code is mostly words and words are much easier to read in a proportional font. Symbols are plenty clear enough in Verdana, all letters are distinguishable, and I don't use mid-line alignment so I don't see the point in a monospace font outside of the terminal.