Comments on: Making Github’s Code Readable

By: Max

Max — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 02:42:15 +0000

The reason for selecting courier, I believe, is that it is a well known, commonly used, and widely supported fixed pitch font. I personally love fixed pitch for coding, because it causes my text to line up well, so if I am calling the same method on a list of parameters, as often is the case when writing to configuration or log files, I have the parameters in columns, and can use my text editor's column mode to edit them simultaneously. I also find it more readable, as code must be interpreted by my mind and deciphered, I often find myself looking for a specific part of the line; my eyes are in column mode. I agree that the example you showed was badly formatted, but I think the font size was the issue, not the type, and I feel that you could have solved the problem locally with a script like "readability" or such. I do not post this to bitch - I liked the rest of the post. I just happen to have courier's back on this matter.

By: Dan Croak

Dan Croak — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:16:11 +0000

Also, we started to write an iPhone Gorillas app as a goof: flick the touchscreen to send the banana through the air on a TV screen. The two players have their own iPhones used as controllers.

By: Dan Croak

Dan Croak — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:14:39 +0000

“If you’re on Windows or OS X, you probably don’t either.”

To all those “blame Windows” commenters, I believe the author is not on Windows. I’ll take a wild guess and say Ubuntu.

I’d second the Userstyle idea.

Github’s code looks pretty good on my Mac OS X, I think because of their super-duper anti-aliasing?

By: Hans

Hans — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:18:45 +0000

C'mon, if you want your code to look good don't use Windows. But if you insist, your problem is font rendering so you colud try GDI++, take a look at this http://vladg.com/2009/03/make-windows-fonts-look-as-smooth-as-mac-os-x-fonts/.

By: anon

anon — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:57:02 +0000

Fonts always look ugly on Windows. It looks fine on mac (Courier), and would look fine on Linux (Bitstream Vera is a pretty standard font). Font rendering is also better on those OSs

By: gene t

gene t — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:10:13 +0000

I’ve made suggestions, they respond pretty quickly, within an hour (i.e. , they don’t implement your suggest in an hour, they indicate they’ll work on it, ). One was that they do some kind of primitive code folding based on line indentations;

http://github.com/contact

By: Olivetti Underwood

Olivetti Underwood — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:30:54 +0000

Not to mention the general butt-ugliness of blogs in general. Wake up, web!! This is 2009, not 1985. People have high resolution screens and don’t need to read “light gray on white” type in 4 point helvetica. Pretty much anything is more readable. Any more “90% gray” and I’m going to program firefox to substitute fonts and colors mercilessly.

By: masklinn

masklinn — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:09:24 +0000

FWIW in OSX, courier (the default monospace font for both Safari and Camino) looks pretty good I think.

By: mcrittenden

mcrittenden — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:08:25 +0000

Or just set up a userstyle to make it use whatever typeface you want it to.

By: dude

dude — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:03:24 +0000

First of all, you’re a programmer and you don’t have bitstream vera sans? Second, looks like you’re on windows so you’re used to having everything look like shit… Why would github cater to people with such low standards to begin with?