Return to using Fira Code as the default monospace font

[ara4n]

Return to using Fira Code as the default monospace font, because Inconsolata lacks Box Drawings and Geometric Shapes glyphs.

Fixes #31289
Partially reverts matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#3008
Provides a different solution to #9765

[ara4n]

(i've set a full playwright screenshot update going overnight)

[t3chguy]

Is the font size increasing substantially expected?

[ara4n]

Is the font size increasing substantially expected?

yes, pretty much; unintuitively there's no real guarantee that two fonts have similar physical sizing at the same point size.

That said, I can't quite decide whether this is a feature or a bug - i.e. are we just used to Inconsolata being smaller.

I agree it jars a bit (and the reason I moved away from Fira in 2019 was because it was a bit ugly due to the size and the @ symbols); I'll experiment with some alternatives.

In other news, just how flakey should the playwright snapshot tests be? All sorts of unrelated screens claim to have changed due to this.

[ara4n]

ftr, I think the choice of monospace fonts on Google Fonts with suitable licenses and fuller unicode support here are:

• Google Sans Code
• Fira Code
• Cascadia Code
• IBM Plex Mono
• JetBrains Mono

[t3chguy]

In other news, just how flakey should the playwright snapshot tests be? All sorts of unrelated screens claim to have changed due to this.

They are mostly stable, some known issues were recently fixed around map rendering, some others may still lurk.

https://e2e-31302--matrix-react-sdk.netlify.app/#?testId=8dfc0d81b54fac499770-4911a8c051239e1a3ae6&q=s:failed & https://e2e-31302--matrix-react-sdk.netlify.app/#?testId=a5a7240da5001bef4375-5678fb9e8a8d87cadd6d&q=s:failed both look to be related to the effective monospace font size change

[ara4n]

So in terms of choices:

Inconsolata:

Fira Code:

Google Sans Code:

Cascadia Code:

Jetbrains Mono:

Honestly, they're all pretty similar... other than Inconsolata which is more condensed than the rest. So I vote we go with Fira Code (which was commissioned by Mozilla, as opposed to the others which come from Google/MSFT/Jetbrains), and if necessary bump the font size down by 1 point for multiline code blocks?

ftr, switching fonts around here is a matter of:

grep -rl 'fira-code' package.json res src playwright test | xargs perl -pi -e's/fira-code/inconsolata/g'
grep -rl 'Fira Code' res src playwright test | xargs perl -pi -e's/Fira Code/Inconsolata/g'

[ara4n]

Is the font size increasing substantially expected?

this was pissing me off, so i've tried #31364