📺 My wife and I are really enjoying “The Great British Bake Off”, “The Marvelous Mrs. Mazel”, and “The Good Place” lately. It is still really hard to watch anything with a baby in the house, though.

Dear Apple Music: Just because I listened to Sixpence Non The Richer’s cover of “There She Goes” (originally by the La’s, and arguably about heroin, for goodness sake), doesn’t mean I want to listen to Christian music in all my personalized mixes. 🙄

So far the snowfall hasn’t been so bad—only a few inches so far. It is windy, though, and very cold. My daughter, home on a snow day, is watching “Frozen”, which is apt. I am turning my attention to hot tea and (less hot) database programming.

One thing to do when you’re supposed to be writing is to fuss about your writing environment.

Not wasting time

Choosing the perfect writing font is a classic way to procrastinate—but it is not a waste of time. Fonts are important. A good font is not only highly legible, it also conveys a subliminal emotional effect on the reader. Naturally, it follows that it will also have similar effects on the writer. A good font will make you feel better while you are writing—maybe because you can read it more easily, or because you find elements of it, its curves or serifs, aesthetically pleasing. Whatever the reason, picking a font that is pleasing can have a profound effect on your writing.

What makes a good writing font?

For me, as a writer and programmer who began typing text on a computer in the 1980s, I gravitate toward monospaced fonts. Every character in a monospaced font has the same width. This is useful in programming or for data files, because, in those uses, you often want to align columns of text. It is not useful at all in typesetting books, of course; text laid out in monospace fonts looks primitive and wide-open. Primitive and wide-open, however, are perfect attributes for text that I am writing, breaking apart, moving around, and recombining. Writing in monospaced fonts is, on a subconscious level, freeing. It helps me feel like nothing in my text is set in stone.

Considerations

Whether the font is monospaced or proportional is only part of what is important. Other things matter, too: the shapes of the characters; whether they have serifs or not; whether some look identical to others (l vs. 1, or O vs. 0, for example); and so on.

Beyond that, some fonts render better on screen than others. For example, Verdana and Georgia were commissioned by Microsoft specifically to be look good, clear, and legible on screens, rather than on paper. This was revolutionary at the time, as was their free-to-use licensing. Consequently, these two fonts were adopted almost everywhere on the web for a while. Georgia is still one of the eight font options in Apple’s iBooks ebook reader.

Your particular display and operating system have a lot to do with what font looks good. In general, displays are much higher resolution and much higher quality now than when Verdana and Consolas were invented. As you might expect, this means that all all scalable fonts look better on modern, high-resolution displays. Still, some fonts will look much sharper than others on some displays. For example, on my Dell 27” 4K display for my work machine, a Windows 10 laptop, Consolas looks the best for the terminal and any coding I am doing, and Sax Mono looks better for writing actual documents. These fonts don’t offer similar advantages to me on my Mac or on iOS, however. They look fine, but they really pop for me on my work machine.

My favorite writing fonts over the years

There are tons of monospaced fonts available. Here are a handful that I have used over the years, with the platform I used them on in parentheses. I recommend trying them in your text editor, especially the newer ones listed at the bottom.

1. Monaco (Mac)
2. Menlo (Mac)
3. Consolas (Windows)
4. Source Code Pro (Windows)
5. Droid Sans Mono (Windows, Android)
6. Sax Mono (Windows)
7. IBM’s Plex (Mac, iOS, Windows)
8. iA Writer Duospace (Mac, iOS)

These are listed in the order in which I have adopted them. I tend to use only a few at a time, depending on which one looks best on my hardware and software at the moment. Below, I highlight two of my favorite, very much related, fonts for writing these days: Plex and iA Writer Duospace.

IBM’s Plex

IBM released Plex, an open source font that will be used in all of IBM’s published materials going forward, in late 2017. It isn’t the only open source font that’s free for anyone to download and use, but it is a really good one. Plex Mono, its monospaced variant, looks fantastic on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Its edges are crisp, and the stroke has a consistent width; it looks like the lines fit just right in the pixel grid that makes up the screen.

iA Writer Duospace

The iOS development company iA took IBM’s Plex Mono and tweaked it a little bit to make it even better, in their opinion, for writing. They kept the font monospaced except for M’s and W’s. It’s a pretty simple change, but a lot of thought went into it. iA Writer’s article about this process is absolutely fascinating—I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

The resultant font, iA Writer Duospace, looks great on my MacBook Pro. I prefer Plex Mono on my iPad and iPhone, though. There is something about the wider W and M that looks different in the two platforms. It could just be that my iOS screens are a lot smaller, and width is at a greater premium. It could also just be that I prefer my letters to line up vertically, especially when my text is constrained to a narrow column.

Perfect, for now

For now, I am very happy writing in Plex and iA Writer Duo on my Apple devices. I still happily use SaxMono and Consolas on the PC for writing notes and coding, though Plex Mono is starting to creep into use for my todo.txt file and in other places. Every year or two I look for something better, but I probably won’t change from these four main fonts until I get new hardware, which could change how everything is rendered, but that is probably a long way off.

I hope I set up mirroring to GitHub correctly. It is a geeky feature, for sure, but I’m not 100% sure if I set it up correctly.

We are bracing for a blizzard tonight, which is expected to snow us in all day tomorrow. School is canceled already. (Work isn’t.) I feel like it is a metaphor for what’s going on in my life right now. (Photo is historical.)

It looks like I will be doing some C# coding for work this month. That stuff is more interesting than the database stuff I do, and far more rewarding than the VBA stuff I have to do sometimes. I wish I could use Swift instead, though.

I like TweetBot a lot more than I like Twitter.

It must be January 2, because I just created a literal “Laundry List” in Reminders.

It’s back to work for me today, and I a digging out of my email inbox. Sometime later I will add a new “2018” folder to my “file system for life”, the filing system I wrote about in Plaintext Productivity several years ago. It feels good, each year, to marvel at how many project folders I created last year, leave them behind, and to prepare a clean space for new work.

The beginning of the year is a time for setting goals. I have set some goals, and may post them here later. This list, however, represents my anti-goals—my to-don’t list, if you will.

1. Lamenting failures rather than celebrating successes
2. Being more interested in process than product
3. Talking myself out of things
4. Planning a project, rather than starting it
5. Drafting blog posts, but never finishing them
6. Letting important things pile up
7. Not letting unimportant things go

These are the vampires that I have let in. They are no longer welcome.

I cooked a New Years Day feast for my family today. I ate so much I feel food drunk right now. That’s probably not the wisest way to kick off a healthy new year.

Reading people’s New Years Day posts has been both electrifying and chilling. 2017 was a tough year for everyone’s mental health. It seems that a lot of people plan to limit Twitter and Facebook and the ridiculous daily news cycle this year. Me too.

We are at my neighbors' house for a simulated 7:30 PM ball drop. Fun NYE party!

My daughter’s cookie decorating skills are advancing! I’m so proud of her. 😀🍪

I started this blog in the summer, and since then I have published 30 posts, including this one. As far as output goes, I have met my goal, and I am happy with that.

Most popular posts

In the spirit of publishing year-end best-of lists, here are my top five most popular posts from 2017:

1. Ulysses, a peerless writing tool, a short essay about my favorite writing software. I love good software, and think way too much about what makes productivity software, well, more productive.
2. Choosing an iPad Pro Keyboard, in which I compare three of the main keyboards iPad users like me might be considering.
3. Comparing todo.txt and TaskPaper formats, which are two plaintext task list formats. I love plaintext, love productivity software, and love not having lock-in with proprietary software vendors. I have been using both formats for different planning and task management tasks at work all year.
4. Three ways to create nested projects in todo.txt, which addresses a common problem with the todo.txt format.
5. Contexts in Getting Things Done, in which I describe the challenges I faced dealing with contexts in the GTD system.

These posts reflect some of my main interests: productivity software and systems, and Apple hardware. I have also written a little bit about Android, the Essential Phone, and parts of the free and open web that interest me.

Thoughts on the writing process

One thing that I have learned this year, from writing regularly again, is how much work it can be to complete a blog post. I have a half-dozen incomplete blog post drafts in my Ulysses library at any given moment. Shaping them into something worth reading is a lot of work—work that I don’t often complete as quickly as I would like. Even a simple 500-word post has to be written and re-written three or four times before I think it is worth publishing.

The writing process is valuable to me, though. Writing is a lot different than analyzing data (my day job) or writing code (my nighttime hobby). Writing, re-writing, and revising help me think and help me focus in ways that my more mathematically-focused activities do not. Plus, it feels good to communicate to the world, and to own all the content I produce and publish it on my own platform, under my own name.

The future

I plan to blog regularly in 2018, both on this site and on mjdescy.micro.blog. I have even set up regularly scheduled reminders (Apple Reminders, naturally) to help keep me on track. Thanks for reading.

I don’t love how en-dashes (–) and em-dashes (—) look identical in Ulysses. I know it is because I use monospace fonts. I just wish Ulysses did something to differentiate them. I don’t know/trust that macOS is inserting the correct symbol when I type (dash) (dash) (dash).

It was a really close game!

I’m demoting TweetBot to page 3 of Spingboard. I’m not sure how long that will last.

🎬 This article is the best thing I’ve ever read about Star Wars.

📚 “Ready Player One” looks promising. I’m one chapter in, and it’s fun.

The 2017 news cycle has worn me out. I am looking for something purely escapist to read. I’m considering “Ready Player One” and “The Last Unicorn”.

I am vacillating between being lazy and productive today. It is a vacation day, so I shouldn’t be too hard on myself.

🎬 I am finally seeing “The Last Jedi” tonight. Hope it is good!

After an eventful trip to see family, we are back at home. Today is a rebuilding day: unpacking, grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, dishes, etc.