For the most part the speed gain of that font comes from the left padding on the capitals. But proportional fonts are faster to read allegedly because of the shape words forms. At any rate, before seeing that study I was anecdotally convinced.
Although speed is not a limiting factor, the little extra effort it takes to read monospace is taxing. In other words, not having to focus on the words with more deliberation helps on long days.
For the clarity, I also modified some punctuation glyphs. For instance, the ‘!’ is larger.
And tabular alignment is something IDE could make for us. There are some DSLs that have tables, IntelliJ has them.
Oh I totally agree that reading body text is faster with a proportional font! I don't think many people would dispute that.
But with code specifically, it seems harder to see the exact punctuation. You're not scanning word shapes, you have to pay attention to individual symbols. I shudder to think of a RegEx in a proportional font, where a period barely has width. Or how do you deal with a single quote followed by a double quote? Or two single quotes? Or zero vs oh?
Although speed is not a limiting factor, the little extra effort it takes to read monospace is taxing. In other words, not having to focus on the words with more deliberation helps on long days.
For the clarity, I also modified some punctuation glyphs. For instance, the ‘!’ is larger.
And tabular alignment is something IDE could make for us. There are some DSLs that have tables, IntelliJ has them.