I do like these fonts, but DJR had this idea with the (excellent) Input family of fonts years ago:

https://input.djr.com/

A bit weird to not mention that.

Unfortunately until editors start supporting this (and I’m not sure what would motivate them to), these remain great ideas only.

Input's method seems to be fundamentally very different to this. Monaspace keeps the grid intact and only changes the characters visually (situationally overlaps wide letters to neighbouring narrow characters' spaces). Input just pretends to be monospace in its aesthetics, I don't really understand what's supposed to be special with that.

Fair points on the technical implementation.

I more meant the idea of using different fonts in the same buffer to represent different kinds of text.

Input is a proportional font.

Monaspace is a monospace font that uses contextual alternatives: it changes how letters look depending on surrounding letters.

They are nothing alike in their approach to this problem.

(Also this is a marketing piece. Contextual alternatives is not a new tech.)

> Input is a proportional font.

it is also a monospaced font

Yes there is a version of Input that is a monospaced font and doesn't solve the problem tackled by Monaspace and the proportional version of Input and is therefore as relevant to this discussion as .. I dunno .. Courier New.

I’m not sure why you think this conversation is about the proportional variant.

Honest question: does emacs (GUI) not support this?

Emacs totally supports this!

Mixing monosoace and proportional fonts can be a little strange, but there are some 3rd party packages or guides (prot has one iirc) to workaround it.

Which editors?

Given GitHub is owned by Microsoft, I think VS Code supporting mixing fonts in a buffer would be a good start!

Yes, I configured VS Code to use Monaspace a while ago.

What is the auto-update mechanism on macOS? One of the primary reasons I use ungoogled chromium is because I can update it via homebrew myself. I don’t trust browsers with running invisible background auto-updaters.

Keystone had a pretty mixed history on macOS, with things like the WindowServer bug and that one time it deleted the /var symlink. Do you know if the new updater is safer to use? I can't find out much about it.

> Do you know if the new updater is safer to use?

I have no data on that. All software has bugs, the updater included.