Oh but they could. Are programmers condemned to an eternity monospace typewriter hell because we are too lazy to build better editors? Will we be able to upgrade to proportional fonts before the singularity occurs and programming becomes obsolete anyways?

I've been proportional for about 3 years now; once you go with better typography you can't really go back.

Yes, we probably are condemned. For the same reason that mathematicians are condemned to know how to add and subtract, even though one could achieve the same results using a more general method.

Monospace is just simpler. We use it in consoles, and they aren't going away or being revolutionized. And if you want to write a new text editor, you will probably end up supporting monospace behavior before proportional simply because it is such a simple and flexible algorithm.

And in the end, the only reason to use proportional font is for style and a marginal increase in readability.

So it's not a matter of laziness, but of efficiency and design fundamentals.

> And in the end, the only reason to use proportional font is for style and a marginal increase in readability.

Everyone always claims that "we read code" more than "we write code", yet we still optimize for writing rather than reading. Reading code that has been typeset well is a joy and much improved experience vs. reading code that has not.