i have addressed this in one of the other comments. it is impossible to achieve both elegance (good look) and consistency (monospace width) in these cases. many folks, like yourself, are pioneering full Unicode editing. we, on the other end, are just trying to make editing without ligatures elegant because ASCII, i believe, would remain predominant for a long time to come.
I kind of think monospacing is overrated in programming. Sroustrup typeset the entire of The C++ Programming Language in variable width font and it looks totally fine. I've used variable width fonts in my editor a fair bit too.
I think the main problem with it is you need to use tabs for indentation and unfortunately spaces comprehensively won that battle. IMO that's because although tabs are clearly better, spaces are definitely more idiot-friendly and there are a lot of idiots in the world - or at least people who don't give a shit about nice formatting. So large tab based codebases tended to end up with a horrible mix of tabs and spaces.
well, my "pioneering efforts" :) are killed by language designers, as you note "it is impossible", so we can only waste time looking for various workarounds like using fonts designed around those limits...
i think that you also maintained that it is impossible to reconcile monospace with Unicode.
what would be ideal is a variable-width font which covers most Unicode characters consistently. some Unicode characters (eg, arrow) would need space of 2 characters and so on. making it elegant would require quite a lot of work to ensure Unicode does't look out of place (eg, arrow in your comment).
these are the problems which make me feel full Unicode editing is difficult to achieve in the short run. not to mention the obvious issue of typing Unicode characters from the ASCII keyboard.
i've included a reasonable subset of Unicode in Myna but it may not look very good. don't get me wrong, i appreciate the Unicode advocacy. but until we've something good-looking and well-behaving tooling on that side, using it would be quite frustrating.
Is it really impossible? I'm not disputing you, but for my own learning. Is there somewhere I could read about impossibility of ligatures and monospace?
It's just a fundamental limitation of being boxed, nothing deeper than that: that means you can't fully control spacing, which is crucial in any design. For a simplified example, you can't have a long arrow that is as wide as 2.5 boxes, but instead of 0.5 boxes for spacing only have 0.1 (so a total of 2.6 boxes)
