But it isn't an edge case! It's not an edge case, if it isn't a use case!

This is an edge case as much as building a rasterizer directly into the terminal is an "edge case".

> But it isn't an edge case! It's not an edge case, if it isn't a use case!

The fact that a random commenter on HN used a non-monospaced font with refterm actually makes it a use case.

I do, however, agree that it is an edge case with a very low probability.

Because it's such an improbable edge case, it seems like it's not relevant to the more general discussion of "does refterm's speed and features actually show that the rendering problem is far easier than the Microsoft developers made it out to be".

The Microsoft terminal doesn't render monospaced fonts, the overwhelmingly common case, nearly as fast as refterm. If rendering variable-width fonts is somehow intrinsically insanely expensive for some reason (which I haven't seen anyone provide good evidence for), then a good implementation would still just take refterm's fast monospaced rendering implementation and use it for monospaced fonts, and a slower implementation for variable-width fonts.

That is - refterm's non-existent variable-width font rendering capabilities do not excuse the Windows terminal's abysmal fixed-width font rendering capabilities.

Agreed. It doesn't seem like it is relevant. My comment was more addressing that it _is_ an edge-case, albeit a very unlikely one.

Wait, what? Your edge case is something that no one would ever (should ever?) do? Are you going to complain about it not rendering scripts fonts correctly either?

Also, it's worth noting that this isn't a compelling argument in the first place because the windows terminal doesn't even come close to rendering readable Arabic, it fucks up emoji rendering, etc – all cases that Casey was able to basically solve after two weekends of working on this.

In my 25 years of software development I've found that I'm rarely able to enumerate what an application should or shouldn't do on my own. Unless the app is extremely simple and has very few options it's incredibly unusual for any individual to understand everything about it. While I don't have a use case where I'd want to use a variable space font in a terminal, that doesn't mean such a case doesn't exist for anyone. Maybe some people want that feature.

Windows Terminal, for some reason, gives users the option to change their font to one that isn't monospaced, so I'd argue that it should render them correctly if the user chooses to do that.

Would you actually...?