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use a proportional font. They are more readable. That’s why we use them for literally everything else besides code.
gemini://clanmorgan.org/gemlog/2023-05-09-proportional-coding.gmi
The images look more or less the same. Both have colors that detract from the readability.
As for "everything else", that is easily disproven. Various games would look terrible in a proportional font. At worst, they would be unplayable. Neither xterm(1) nor urxvt(1) appear to support putting a font not into a grid, so that's pretty much a non-starter for coding.[1]
Dove's Type probably isn't a good example of a proportional font to jam into a terminal, though it has fans.
https://typespec.co.uk/doves-type-revival/
Readability is debatable; I could code in a proportional font. Would it be any sort of improvement? Eh... even with a proportional font, I'd still need a terminal with a fixed-width font and the usual graph paper notebook for when a grid is necessary. The current page of said notebook has some Forth stack fiddlings on it; a fixed-width grid suits those far better than proportional prose. It's almost as if context matters; a HTML programmer could easily work with a proportional font. A unix sysadmin dabbling with C and hex dumps? Probably less so.
[1] An IDE would fail somewhere along the question line of "okay, but how do you disable the colors?" and "okay, but where are the vi keys?" and "okay, but is it available on OpenBSD?" and "okay, but does it integrate with the usual four xterms?"
That's from upper left going clockwise amfora, vi (not vim!), ksh, and rogue. My IDE, in other words.
Sometimes I have a big full-screen xterm up, good to read something short like the "The History of the Peloponnesian War". The paper book took longer to read, but that was more due to the book being read first, and having lots of footnotes and pretty pictures, not so much the proportional versus fixed font thing. (Probably, distractions are a much bigger issue than whatever font... pop-ups? Open office design? Binging on "riders on the storm" because someone mentioned door slaying in a roguelike development channel?)
I have had trouble with both proportional and fixed fonts where the `' look pretty similar (and 0Ol1). Notably in the scan of "Paradigms of AI Programming" where ` and ' mean different things to LISP, and I was zooming in on a blurry tick in the PDF to try to divine which way it bent. Pretty sure the OCR hadn't always gotten it right, either.
Regardless, monofur is the best font--Comic Sans MS is the good thing that came out of Redmond, and monofur improves on that by being fixed width. Behold!
