I was reminded of and rewatched this 43-minute 2016 talk by David Jonathan Ross with great interest:

Ross designed Input, a coding font superfamily which was very inspiring to me in the day, and taught me that coding fonts could be a place of surprising creativity and innovation.

First of all, Input has four width options: from regular through Narrow to Condensed to Compressed – this not only allows to avoid the “blocky/​squareish” nature of many coding fonts, but also, pragmatically, to squeeze in more stuff on mobile screens.

Secondly, since a lot of coding environments didn’t (and maybe still don’t) allow for fine-tuned typography settings, you can bake them into a font upon download – choose a different default line height to be there in the font itself, or have your favorite style of zero just hanging there in the default slot.

Thirdly, serif versions of Input coexist with sans serif, and so does italic, and you can mix them together.

But most important thing comes at the end: you can imagine coding in non-monospaced fonts! What seemed like blasphemy before made so much sense once I put it to use – I still code in Input Sans Narrow (non monospaced) to this day:

Of course, since the release of Input in 2014 a few other coding fonts did interesting creative things in this (mono)space. But to me this will always be the original that opened my eyes to what’s possible, and the talk captures so well a lot of deep thinking that went into the font. To quote Ross:

Type design is design and design is about solving problems.