How do you actually code effectively with a proportional font?

Without a monospaced font, column cut, copy and paste operations are effectively eliminated (as nothing lines up vertically) and that is one of the programmer editing constructs I use the most.

I could not live without column editing.

Lack of column editing always drives me back to monospaced fonts in the end, too. I like the proportional look, but column operations ate just too convenient.

(Perhaps I need to make an emacs keyboard shortcut to toggle font type at the press of a key. Then i could quickly switch to monospaced for my rectangular operations. That might work. Wouldn't help for Xcode or Visual Studio though.)

I think it was Eclipse that switched to a Monospace font when entering column selection mode. While having a mode and not a quasi-mode for that operation is highly questionable to me, the automatic switch is a very nice touch. Especially to those who usually use a proportional font.

UltraEdit and UEStudio also do that. It takes care of the column selection problem nicely.

Komodo doesn't switch automatically, but you can set up a keyboard shortcut to switch between monospaced and proportional fonts.

I am very curious: where (programming language) and how do you use column editing? I must be missing out on some huge productivity booster, but I think having automatic code layout makes this feature as good as 100% superfluous.

Column mode becomes helpful any time you have a few lines of code that look and operate very close to each other.

For example https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/security/commo...

you are writing "cap_capget", you could write three lines,

     effective
     inheritable
     permitted

And now, select in block mode the text you typed, click copy. Then select blank column to the right of any of the text, and type

     = cred->cap_

once you finished typing that (since you typed in block mode, it typed that across all 3 lines at once), now press your ctrl-v . and then type semicolon. Done.

        *effective   = cred->cap_effective;
	*inheritable = cred->cap_inheritable;
	*permitted   = cred->cap_permitted;

Here is some quick example of how you could use column mode during programming.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeYmPV3DpG8

For Visual Studio: http://joelabrahamsson.com/select-columns-of-text-in-visual-...

One thing about font choices is that they will vary depending on several factors:

* The pixel density of your display

* Rendering method (ClearType, OSX anti-aliasing, etc.)

* The size of text you prefer

* How sharp your vision is

* And of course, personal taste.

As a reference point, I'm using Windows 8 on a moderately high-density display for a Windows laptop, at around 140 DPI. I'm old, with less than perfect vision, but it corrects well with my single-vision computer glasses.

My favorite font these days, as I mentioned elsewhere, is Georgia. I just find it so easy to read.

Other proportional fonts I've tried for coding and liked fairly well are Verdana, Cambria, Rockwell, and Source Sans Pro.

The best thing, of course, is to try a few and see what pleases your eyes.