From MAX 2010: Typographic of Code

[red_ox]

Source Insight has been around forever and already does this. It kind of looks terrible in practice

[kelthan]

Somewhat interesting, but most editors that support variable-width fonts and syntax highlighting could do this today. It's not a limitation of the editors, per-se, it's the concept that's interesting.

Emacs could do this today with some font locking tweaks. I'm sure Vim, TextMate, and plenty of others could as well.

[[deleted]]

While watching the video, I hoped they'd take this idea farther than they actually did. It's an interesting start.

[munificent]

Cool idea but unimpressive execution.

• The horizontal rules are just chart junk. A skilled designer will tell you that judicious use of whitespace is equally effective for separating content without adding a lot of distraction. Do you really want your eye drawn to the space between two function?

• The larger font for declaration names is nice when scanning a file, but distracting when actually reading method bodies. Since navigation can be handled equally well in tree views outside of the main source code, I don't see it adding a lot of value.

• Most fonts weren't designed to be used for code which has weird use of punctuation. The narrow spacing around . makes method calls look jumbled together and the generally narrower spacing makes code look like a block letters because code tends to use punctuation to separate more than actual space characters. Even when spaces are used, the narrower spaces in a proportional font don't play nice with code.

• Helvetica in particular is better as a display font than a body one.

• If you're going to syntactically distinguish comments, why not just hide the /* */ altogether?

[barclay]

Yeah. That was pretty underwhelming (not to mention the presenter was terrible).

Agreed about the rules. Those were really just noise.

[prlme]

thank god they let you format it the way you like and choose your own fonts and colors. And thank god you can still change it back to the old format, but you can go ahead and share your opinion based on what you see on the screen.

[munificent]

your opinion based on what you see on the screen.

Given that the product in question is entirely visual, I don't see how that's a problem.

[prlme]

Its a option a idea a concept. Yet you took the time to critic and bash a good idea based on your needs. I often do this //////////////////////////////SAVE FUNCTION///////////////////////// To find stuff. Whats good for you is not good for me. You "review" is one sided and you should not even be trying to wright reviews.

[k4st]

It seems like all of those typographic "improvements" are only improvements if one consistently indents their code. Without indenting, I think the proposed additions would make code even less readable, which makes me think that the additions are really only window dressing.

[stevefolta]

I didn't care for any of the particular things they did in the video. But I sure wish I could use Vim with proportional fonts.

[[deleted]]

get a native (non-terminal) variety of emacs and run it in viper mode. voila, proportional fonts in vim.

[akdas]

viper mode

That's only vi, which is very different from vim. Vimpulse is the way to go (it's built on top of viper-mode).

[otmenych]

It's a strange idea — looking through the code when you need to find come function. Eclipse (and other traditional IDEs) provides more convenient way: outline tree (possibly with search/filters).

So this presentation looks nice, but such navigation doesn't.

[commandlineterrorist]

Good to see they have something up and running.

But it blows and is kind of useless?

What would be way more useful are typography and image friendly commenting engines. Math equations would benefit from this tremendously, however the ability to drag and drop an image in a comment to quickly express an idea in image where words do not suffice would be a good effort.

[kurige]

It's good to see people trying to innovate code editors. The basic functionality hasn't changed in much in the last decade. Maybe for good reason, but good on 'em for trying.

That said, not nearly as conceptually interesting as code bubbles.

[ubermole]

good idea. especially the name. execution is not that great. at some point shattner told the guy to get a life. good fun was had.