I want looking at a dense page of code to look as beautiful and comfortable as reading a magazine
I am trying to imagine what a page of code laid out by a professional designer would look like and I can hear a million programmers screaming bloody murder in my head about the thoughtful use of whitespace, proportional-width fonts (even though they are ones chosen to clearly differentiate between confusing characters like 1/I and 0/O), and the occasional change in font size for... what is the source code equivalent of a subhead, anyway? Comments?
I am trying to imagine what a page of code laid out by a professional designer would look like and I can hear a million programmers screaming bloody murder in my head about the thoughtful use
There are beautiful programmer fonts nowadays that look amazing on Apple's high resolution screens.
There are several GUIs for Vim/Neovim that take advantage of the GPU and the text rendering abilities of modern computers in general and Macs in particular [1].
And once you get used to seeing your code this way, it's hard to go back.
Nicolas Rougier has also implemented a few of those ideas in a series of packages for Emacs called "NANO Emacs"; the actual implementation goes beyond what's discussed in the paper and is worth checking out.
"It is as if typography recommendations had been frozen sometime during the eighties and nothing has ever changed since then." hahahhaah YEP
I love the exploratory screenshot of a function reformatted with the comments floating on the left of a hairline instead of next to the source, with the function name nice and big and bold right next to the version control info.
I agree, that's a really great example. It would be even more natural for tags in org-mode, which already supports drawing tags away from the text itself to a far-right column, but they really could be moved in the other direction to the left of a hairline next to the bullets, and they'd be more readable.
BTW, Nicolas has a lot of interesting packages exploring use of graphical design elements in Emacs apart from the Nano Emacs stuff; for example, there's https://github.com/rougier/svg-tag-mode. I love how he chooses to represent dates and dates with times attached, and to distinguish active vs. inactive dates with shading rather than "[" and "<". That actually makes it easier to spot a common org-mode mistake without having to call up the agenda.
I am trying to imagine what a page of code laid out by a professional designer would look like and I can hear a million programmers screaming bloody murder in my head about the thoughtful use of whitespace, proportional-width fonts (even though they are ones chosen to clearly differentiate between confusing characters like 1/I and 0/O), and the occasional change in font size for... what is the source code equivalent of a subhead, anyway? Comments?