Code, Visual aestheticism, JetBrains and more

Why it matters?

Strangely, sometimes I feel satisfied by just seeing the code written by anyone on JetBrains (Intellij/Pycharm/etc) based IDEs. After digging through some layers, I found a lot of aspects that make the code stunning and want to keep editing and writing more in the workspace. This is definitely not an IDE war, just because I am going to talk about Jet brains IDEs. Taste is very subjective when it comes to art and visuals, and along with this the organization and team that you are part of is coming into this, which is almost a random thing that introduces your spirit IDE. I am familiar with JetBrains from my college days itself when I grinding on Android Studio. Initially, I thought, the aesthetics is created by the language syntax. But it takes some time to understand more about this. Luckily my organisation also have these IDEs in the toolbox, so I get my hands into it again after graduation. Sometimes I used NetBeans which gave a similar experience, but there are a lot of things in the sidebar, which are mostly not useful for me. Of course, there might be options to customise, but I am too lazy for that.

The first thing that needs to be looked at is the font of these IDEs. Most of them are monospaced fonts, not proportional ones. These fonts are researched a bit extensively, for achieving the visual intent in code. All fonts have the same width in the monospace typeface. Proportional fonts do not really work here because imagine what happen if we have different-sized bricks in the wall. Believe me, code with less visual intent is a turn-off for most people. It is really helpful in identifying parenthesis and curly braces which are very thin and almost invisible in proportional styled fonts. Most of the IDEs are leveraging this typeface. Python’s indentation system is really great compare than curly braces of other languages. I know that these order and style can be achieved by proper formatting in other languages also, but python is really made for that it seems. May be with the aid of IDEs, it looks pretty easy for me to do whitespaces/tabs indentation.

Coming back to fonts, the default font of the JetBrains IDE is a great one, you can read more about it on their website. The below projections are taken from their site.

Characters remain standard in width, but the height of the lowercase is maximised. This approach keeps code lines to the length that developers expect, and it helps improve rendering since each letter occupies more pixels.

I am not a big fan of dark themes in IDEs and editors, in fact not even a fan. For some reasons I don’t like them. People suggested to switch to dark theme, for healthiness of eye. I don’t find any scientific studies, or may be I am fool. Please share it with me if you find any. Once my friend told me that he is using Dark theme while coding, to get a feel of “hacker”. I get it then, why most people are using it.