On Code Aesthetics: My Favorite Coding Fonts

So there you go. Right when I thought I ‘had it all’ as far as monospaced, coding fonts were concerned, and was settled with my 5 favorite coding fonts – Consolas (from Microsoft), Monaco (the ‘Mac font’), Droid Sans Mono (from Google), DejaVu Sans Mono and Monofur (all these show up in some other top-10-programming-font lists on the Web), along came Adobe today with a brand new monospace coding font, called Source Code Pro. And, I am sold 🙂 Beautiful font. Kudos to Paul Hunt for this work.

Attaching a bunch of screenshots, one for each of them. Pick your own favorite! The editor is MacVim, with the colorscheme summerfruit256, and font size 13.

My first Vim Theme

We all love different code editors, don’t we? Well, my all time favorite is Vim, hands down. I’ve used it for quite a while, and I always thought I could do magic with it. And then came along Practical Vim, that taught me how to really do magic with Vim. That has been followed by VimGolf, that helps me keep sharpening the saw and at the same time have some fun. And to be a bit smug, I am not too bad at it. Of course, there is still a lot to learn and practice. Like a musician, over and over and over again until I can play the ‘chords’ and ‘melodies’ in my sleep.

All these things notwithstanding, I’ve always been an aesthete. Things have to look pretty and neat. To this end, I thought it would be a good idea to get into the world of theming, and see if I can whip together a simple theme for Vim. The idea spawned from me having stumbled upon Adobe Kuler, which helps set up color schemes for Web sites and such. Lo and behold, before I knew it I was messing around with a theme that I liked (which I modified from all-blue to blue-green-red), and mucking around a .vim color file, putting together color values for different components, all complete with some finer points such as underline, bold and italics.

What came out of this 30-minute adventure, I present to you here. Some screenshots are attached to the repository. Take my word for it, making your own theme is not that hard. Hope you have fun.

Discovery of my life:: Unicode-variable in Java

Hallo an alle,

ich weiß nämlich nicht ob ihr schon eine Ahnung davon habt, aber ich hab ganz zufällig was Atemberaubendes rausgefunden, betreffend Java!

Also, wenn ihr schon davon Bescheid gewusst habt, ist meine Begeisterung wahrscheinlich ein wenig übertrieben.

Aber in Linux darf man also mit der folgenden Kombination Unicode reintippen: Shift + Ctrl (Str) + u + Unicode

Beispielsweise,

Shift + Ctrl + u + 0611b =  愛
Shift + Ctrl + u + 03b1 = α
Shift + Ctrl + u + 03b2 = β
Shift + Ctrl + u + 03b3 = γ
Shift + Ctrl + u + 03b4 = δ

=D

Also ich glaub schon, dass ich künftig mehr Java benützen werde, und ich denke so ein Programm wo die Namen so ausschaun wie oben wäre ein echt cooles Programm 😉 Hab auf Komodo Edit und Terminal ausprobiert und es funktionert prima!

Shibboleths

Shibboleth is any usage of language which could be used as an indication of the user’s origins, nativity, or in some cases even affiliation to a certain group. It doesn’t seem to be the same as jargon, argot or cant, because the user seems to have more of a problem disguising the former than the latter three. This article shows a lot of similar such usage in times past and present, in almost all languages in the world, mostly related to how certain specific words can be used to clearly separate a native speaker from someone who just learned the language, because of an overwhelming number of a specific sound that is hard for non-natives to produce, and so forth. Very interesting read.

Something to fry your noodles with

This will give you the run for your money. Trying to get a score of 3000 +, that is. Enjoy 🙂