Who are the "spacists"?

[Mikhail V]

On 19 March 2017 at 22:54, Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Mikhail V wrote:
>>
>> Monospaced text rendering is an artifact,
>> which exist on a very short time period in history.
>> At best, one should just imagine it should not exist, and is
>> just a temporary inconvinience. Actually it lasts already much
>> longer than I would expect.
>
>
> The fact that it *has* lasted so long might be telling us
> something. It has some advantages when machine processing
> text such as source code, where the semantic content is much
> more important than making it look pretty.
>
> --
> Greg


If we speak about information reading, e.g. text or Python code,
then I don't know of any helpful feature, except that characters
are vertically aligned. And the feature is helpful only in this
sense that I can align table columns with integer amount of spaces.
The readability is however very poor and cannot
be remedied with any tricks. Also if one *needs*
monospaced for some reason, then one can always
render units at equal distances, e.g. to compare
two encrypted strings visually, but those
are rare specific tasks.

Obviously there are some technical advantages, e.g.
the algorithms for tiled rendering
are much simpler and respectively hardware
can be much simpler / more performant.
(E.g. tabloid in airport)

Or, for example collision detection, which is part
of mouse text selection algorithm is much simpler, etc.
These are IMO main reasons why it still often used.

Sadly, many people believe that a code editor
should be monospaced, but generally that does not
have any sense.

Mikhail