Re: Using proportional (variable-width) fonts in Emacs23

[rusi <rustompmody@gmail.com>]

On Mar 30, 12:28 am, Uday Reddy <uDOTsDOTre...@cs.bham.ac.uk> wrote:
> rusi wrote:
> >> Well, my subjective feeling is that I read better if the text is in
> >> proportional font, and I can write better if it is in monospace.  
>
> > This is an interesting observation. (Especially the second part)
> > Do you have a clue why?
>
> It must again be the habit of typing in monospace for years.  Your eyes
> are looking for text in a particular place but the proportional font
> condenses it.

By reducing these questions to habits, the implication is that say for
younger folk who only know 'modern' technology (like Word) things like
emacs will be suboptimal and in fact make no sense.

My own sense is that
- Some habits are suboptimal and worth (trying to) change
- Some are suboptimal but its just too uphill to change (eg qwerty vs
dvorak)
- And some things are just naturally wrong -- eg using a dumbed down
mouse interface rather than the keyboard.

Evidently people may disagree on what is natural: eg Microsoft and
Apple have different view on what font is readable on a screen.

Coming back to the typing question:
For the first hundred years after the invention of the typewriter two
things were inseparably linked:
1 Using a keyboard to type
2 The above resulting in 'typewriter' (monospace) text

Surely separating these should make certain optimizations available
that were not available earlier??