With modern languages becoming more and more verbose, especially when fully qualified namespaces are used, I sometimes wonder why I’m still using monospaced fonts for coding. After all, I don’t like reading anything else in a fixed-width typeface, so why is code so different?

Here’s the same [random, very old] snippet of C++ code, in DejaVu Sans Mono:

And in Verdana (proportional spacing):

Which looks better? To be honest I think the latter is more readable, but still it feels wrong to look at code this way.

But really I can’t see too many reasons against it. Vertical alignment of characters should be irrelevant to pretty much any modern language. IMHO indents should be handled with tabs, and when code mingles tabs and spaces changing fonts merely gives the same wonky layout problems as we already get when people use different IDE settings for tab widths. In general function and type names are more readable with proportional spacing, and take up less horizontal space– surely a good thing. About the only strike against using a proportional font that I can think of is when you’re writing daggy console apps with quoted strings of ASCII dashes and asterisks expected to line up to make nice boxes on your 80 x 40 character screen, and that seems kind of anachronistic these days…