The font's designers did create a video and a page explaining their choices if you're interested. I wouldn't necessarily call it haphazard as it seems there was intention behind the choice to use script for the italics.

https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-operator

Thanks for sharing this!

I don't know if I love it or hate it. It's oddly mesmerizing. Props to them for trying something different.

My wife has a 1950's typewriter with a nearly identical font, and i remember seeing many similar ones over the years.

Perhaps it's just visually jarring to you because it's in phosphor. I wonder if some fonts that look fine on paper don't translate well to computers.

> I wonder if some fonts that look fine on paper don't translate well to computers.

I don't have factual data, but this seems obvious to me. Especially on lower DPI screens. For example, a serif font looks just too busy on a screen, whereas I really love them in a book.

I've noticed that on non high-DPI screens and at "reasonable" sizes (say between 10-14), whenever a font has an elaborate design it tends to be unpleasant on the screen, because everything that doesn't line up with the grid tends to get blurry or have random colors at the edges.

I'm somewhat surprised that bitmap fonts have fallen out of favor. While we may get somewhat used to seeing not perfectly sharp fonts and after a while they don't seem blurry anymore, comparing them side by side with a bitmap font is striking. Especially on dark backgrounds, all the different hues are much more subtle, yet better defined.

I'm running terminus[0] on a computer I sometimes use with a 24" FullHD screen and I find the absolute sharpness of it is very, very pleasant to look at. It is both thin AND without blurriness or color fringes, even on dark backgrounds.

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[0] http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/

I've seen this style used to raise the contrast between comments and otherwise. Though I am surprised it works in Vim given that most terminals can't render multiple fonts at once. Are there control characters for that?

IIRC the monospace font itself would have the cursive characters as its "italic" typeface, then the terminal would just need to be sent the control characters for italic text (i.e. https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/)

Oh I see, so it's one font but two styles. That makes more sense (though to be honest I don't think I knew older terminals could do italics either)

It can be tricky to make it work in Vim + Tmux etc., but it can be done provided the font includes it as normal italic typefaces. I use Victor Mono and iirc it's available in two variants depending on whether you want normal italic font or cursive.

I've been using it for a while now, can't say it makes a big difference(both positive or negative), but it kind of looks nice which is the point in the end.

Wezterm can use separate fonts for each style like italic and bold

The script may be the italic glyphs for that font.

> ...does that font used for comments in the screenshot seem like visual terrorism to anyone else? Cursive might be fine on its own, and print is definitely the standard, but haphazardly mixing cursive and print is alarming.

I do it all the time in Vim; it makes it easier to visually ignore comments in the code. For anything that's not a comment, it's pretty ugly.

Seems the intent is to clearly separate commentary from code. I could see that being intentional, imagine cursive annotations on a printed document.

It's not actually cursive though! It's seemingly-random cursive/print mix.

How is cursive for lowercase and normal italic for uppercase random? That said it's a font thing, others may do it more consistently if you're into that.

It's not cursive for lowercase. Look at "which."

The glyphs are just randomly cursive or print. I wasn't complaining about serifs, I was complaining about randomly mixing cursive and print.

That's weird, my complaint is that they don't connect the cursive letters in ligatures

I am mostly feeling sick every time my eyes hit one of those F’s. Otherwise it’s mostly ok.

Oh man I love this color scheme.