Comment by makomk
4 years ago
The fact that Casey Muratori's proposed approach requires the terminal to reimplement the process of correctly mapping characters to glyphs - including stuff like fallbacks to other fonts - is a huge part of the argument for why it's much harder to implement and more complicated than he claims. If it really doesn't do that right for something as simple as a decimal seperator for the font some random HN commenter happened to use, that does tend to suggest the Microsoft employees are in the right here.
The "font some random HN commenter happened to use" is some f****** proportional Calibri. I want to see someone use it in any terminal emulator. Refterm defaults to Cascadia Code, but, fair enough, it doesn't have fallback yet.
Its' description says also: "Reference monospace terminal renderer". "monospace" is there for a reason.
It's worth mentioning though, that Windows Terminal also defaults to Cascadia Code and Cascadia Code was installed automatically on my machine, so it's de-facto the new monospace standard font on Windows starting from 10.
> some f*** proportional Calibri Refterm defaults to Cascadia Code
cascadia is as borken as the other font, so what now?
https://i.imgur.com/WeV8Ror.png
maybe writing a unicode rendering isn't that easy? maybe drop the attitude?
>maybe drop the attitude?
You came here with an attitude.
> I just launched "dir" https://i.imgur.com/lkbOR3i.png can't even print properly the decimal separator. maybe it wasn't that easy.
Turned out it defaults to Cascadia Mono, my bad. Still your argument is wrong, because, like it doesn't work on your machine, on mine it does.
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You can’t use a non-monospace font on a tiled space. Like that literally makes no sense. Of course it won’t look right. This is like asking why you can’t use `out` parameters on an inherent async function.
Whether the font is monospace or not isn't really the problem - that causes some aesthetically ugly spacing, but that's to be expected and it's still readable. The big issue is that the code has completely failed to find a glyph for one of the characters used in something as commonplace as a directory listing from the dir command and people expect better than this from font rendering in modern applications.
If you copy and paste, the characters are there. The problem is that the glyph simply is off the tile.
Then again, refterm doesn't f*ck it up. It still renders proportional font; just aligned to tiles. It is essentially doing the same as for emoji.