Use of Courier in vanilla theme

I know it’s a rather minor detail, but I was curious if there is any specific reason why Courier is included in the fonts for the codefontfamily.

$:/themes/tiddlywiki/vanilla/settings/codefontfamily

The main reason why I bring this up is since Courier is included in Android, it takes precedent over the fallback monospace font, Roboto Mono, which is less thinner than Courier and easier to read on the phone. It seems as if the list and order of fonts for this value are selected to ensure they defauly to a prefered font. ( SF Mono for macOS, Consolas for Windows, etc )

Just for completeness of the thread, the default font stack for $:/themes/tiddlywiki/vanilla/settings/codefontfamily is

"SFMono-Regular",Consolas,"Liberation Mono",Menlo,Courier,monospace

What you describe (Courier being used instead of fallback monospace → Roboto Mono) happens on Chrome and Vivaldi (and so supposedly on all chromium-based Android browsers), but surprisingly not on Firefox. So either the Courier font is built-in into the chromium browsers but not the OS, or Firefox is doing some unexpected interpretation of the font stack and skips the Courier.

I have read somewhere (can’t find it now, but seems true in testing) that the Roboto fonts cannot be indicated explicitly, they only work though the fallback names like monospace. So placing Roboto Mono before Courier, like

"SFMono-Regular",Consolas,"Liberation Mono",Menlo,"Roboto Mono",Courier,monospace

won’t change anything.

I agree that the Roboto Mono is much more readable. Since this applies to the vast majority of Android browsers, I think it would be a good idea to mend it. The only way to do it seems to be removing Courier from the stack completely. So the question remains, with what platform in mind is it there in the first place.

About 6 years ago we copied the font stacks for TW5 from GitHub:

The trigger was this blog post by a GitHub designer:

I would be happy for us to tweak the settings if best practice has moved on since then.

It seems there have been some changes:

  • “Noto Sans” … seems to be new
  • Courier … has been removed

The assignment for different elements seems to use --fontstack-* variables now
On Windows for me Edge and FF use the same fonts.