Monospace font in the Markdown-only editor

[schneeland]

I’m still undecided whether I find monospace necessary or not, but the updated font is a clear improvement over the previous one (in contrast the previous situation, I tend to say, now it could be slightly larger again).

But in any case, it’s nice that the good old ASCII art can make a return now

|-----------|
| LONG LIVE |
| THE BUNNY |
|-----------|
(\__/) ||
(•ㅅ•) ||
/   づ

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@alltiagocom

Couldn’t this be a feature each user could change?

I mentioned this earlier in the topic, we need the change to breath for a bit longer, lets give it at least another week.

The answer here is absolutely maybe. Keep the feedback coming, good or bad, we are reading it all.

One issue I am battling with internally is the targeting of different “personas”/“audiences”

1. General public → just use “rich composer” 99% of the time, none of this is an issue
2. Highly technical users → just use “raw markdown” - generally used to this type of view and many happy with the change
3. Non technical BUT do not want to use rich editor → monospace irks them - eg: @Jagster - prefer a different font

It is a tricky problem, we are always reticent to add more user settings, but I do acknowledge that there is something here, I just want to see how we feel in a week.

[Arkshine]

I was trying to figure out different non-intrusive visual cues, but it’s tough.

The only one that seems acceptable is a label somewhere, like:

And maybe with a color change to help better the visual memory:

It’s pretty visible without being intrusive. It has its share of cons, for sure. It takes some space, but it’s okay in the context of a temporary transition. I’m not 100% convinced, but it seems like an interesting alternative. I just wanted to share the idea. (feel free to open the gifs in a new tab to see in full size; it misses a fullscreen button)

[Andrew_Rowe]

@alltiagocom

it’s a font we don’t use on a regular basis

this for some reason is one of the best arguments against I’ve heard so far. I just had to go check the font in my VS code editor, so see, I am a coder. I had a code editor open on my desktop, and sure enough, it is a mono-space font. I never even noticed. But for some reason, it just feels weird here and my own instance. I’ll give it a week, like Sam is asking, change is jarring, maybe in a week I won’t even notice.

[seanblue]

@Jagster

I normally write longer posts, and I don’t need WYSIWYG, but my users need, so I would stick in marksdown. But monospace is really hard to read, and there is a point why big majority of industry don’t use monospace in editors.

Just out of curiosity — what was the point of this change? It kind of breaks usability now.

I agree. I just wrote a really long post, and honestly the monospace font is giving me a headache. I proofread my posts very thoroughly, and I tend to go back and forth between reading the raw markdown and reading the formatted post while doing so. Now it’s very difficult to do so in the editor section.

I also generally don’t like WYSIWYG. In my experience they are very janky, and I have no intention of using it. So for me, the markdown editor that has existed forever needs to continue to be a smooth user experience.

@sam

This is not really true, all coding editors out there use monospace it is the industry standard.

@schneeland

While that’s true, I’m wondering if this the right metaphor here. If I think of writing posts in Discourse with Markdown in them, I’m mentally not in the “coding space”, but rather in the “web editing space”. And if I look at Discord or JIRA, where I also write Markdown-formatted posts, both do not use monospace fonts.

I agree with @schneeland. I’m a software engineer and regularly use IDEs that of course use monospace font, but this is simply a different context. It would indeed be very jarring if Jira started using a monospace font.

@sam

Monospace comes with other advantages when it comes to markdown, tables are a lot easier to work with

I’m not sure I’ve ever had a problem working with tables in markdown. And besides, even in monospace the vertical bars between each column won’t align since each cell is likely to have a different number of characters in it.

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In any case, I know you want to let the change breathe a bit, but hopefully this feedback helps. Note that my comments are based on the most recent monospace font and I didn’t see the previous version. So I’m only comparing my experience to the one that has existed for years, not to the first monospace font used a couple days ago.

[alltiagocom]

@sam

Monospace comes with other advantages when it comes to markdown, tables are a lot easier to work with, pre-formatted text is a lot easier to work with.

How many people will actually use tables on a forum reply that justifies this? Also, Obsidian uses markdown and uses tables with monospace inside, while the text outside it sans-serif:

I don’t see why the whole composer has to change to monospace when they could co-exist?

I would say 99% of what we write is “normal” text, not markdown.

My honest opinion is that this is not a great feature to be “forced” on users, even if we let it breathe. It’s not a change that users are relieved to have, and that’s visible in most comments. It should be a user preference.

I don’t really see any issue with the composer having the same typeface as the preview. It’s pretty easy to understand what’s happening. It’s been for many years, right? “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it”, they say. And it applies here, I believe.