> In code examples, a proportional-width font is used for identifiers. … At first glance, this presentation style will seem “unnatural” to programmers accustomed to seeing code in constant-width fonts. However, proportional-width fonts are generally regarded as better than constant-width fonts for presentation of text. Using a proportional-width font also allows me to present code with fewer illogical line breaks.

I switched years ago and would never go back to monospace.

So it would be nice if IDEs rich-rendered regions column aligned.

eg, object literals in JS, in which space separator are as a wide as needed to align the values.

JetBrains MPS has a decision table rendering for DSLs, which is similar to what I described.

Monaspace is a monospace font that uses contextual alternatives: it changes how letters look depending on surrounding letters.

They are nothing alike in their approach to this problem.

(Also this is a marketing piece. Contextual alternatives is not a new tech.)

Contextual alternates are normally used for certain scripts, like Arabic, where the shape of each glyph depends on the surrounding glyphs. And they are also used for cursive handwriting fonts where the stroke of the “pen” might have different connection points across letters. Texture healing is a novel application of this technology to code.”

Why has no one tried it before? Because (a) nobody thought of it and (2) OpenType alternates, while they’ve been around for a while, have not always been supported in the sorts of programs that use monospace fonts (code editors and terminals)

>Has no one tried this before?

This is a great execution of a very common font practice.

Conversely, nobody seems to be doing pixel-based hinting anymore, which is why all newer fonts tend to look terrible at small font sizes on lower-DPI displays.

Can't quickly find a screenshot though you can use web dev tools to add

   font-feature-settings: "cv10" 1;

   modify_font cell_width 95%