20 ms·

Programming Fonts – Test Drive

712 points by ChrisGranger 8y ago

soperj 8y ago
Probably a very un-used font for programming, but my favorite is Operator Mono (Book Italic) - https://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/styles/ https://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/styles/ - Strange to be using an italic to code in, but I quite like it. edit: someone has actually added ligatures to operator mono if that's your thing (https://github.com/kiliman/operator-mono-lig https://github.com/kiliman/operator-mono-lig)
- fxfan 8y ago
  600usd is a bit steep- no disrespect to the designer.
  - soperj 8y ago
    It is $199 for 1 computer. Don't know where you see 600?
    - brennebeck 8y ago
      I’d imagine from the pricing for the complete font, which is that price: http://s.rnbk.org/Photo-2019-01-21-14-10-2jezMYmKLZXqYskTrz6M.jpg http://s.rnbk.org/Photo-2019-01-21-14-10-2jezMYmKLZXqYskTrz6... Though, the price for the Mono-only (bottom of sidebar) does match what you said. So I’m guessing it’s just misread/UX. Edit: sentence clarity
    - number6 8y ago
      Best Value Bundle. But to be honest even $200 is too much for my taste
ilrwbwrkhv 8y ago
very good site...... love it
- klageveen 8y ago
  Thanks!
Jerry2 8y ago
One of my favorites is PragmataPro [0] (with powerline glyphs) and I'm sad it's not there. I guess they can't use proprietary fonts. PragmataPro was so weird when I started using it but it has grown on me and now I have a hard time switching to a terminal that uses something else. In any case, if you're like me and you look at the terminal screen for hours on end every single day, find some font that won't tire your eyes and is optimized for your screen. If you have to squint or double-check letters or numbers because they're unclear, increase the size or switch to a different font. [0] https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/
- gnulinux 8y ago
  Huh. Not to sound cheap, but it really seems unnecessary to me to spend 60 Eur for a font, when I already have really good fonts like Inconsolata in my reach for free. Is font really that important, do you think? This is an honest question, please don't think I'm sarcastic.
  - Jerry2 8y ago
    That's an average price of a AAA game, right? And what kind of utility do you get from that? Just did a quick check... I bought it in Sept of 2012, 2323 days ago. $70 / (2323 day * 6 hrs/day) = $0.005/hr Did I get my money's worth (and mind you, I paid less than that.. I'm just going by today's prices)? I think I did. It all depends on how you value things.
    - darkcha0s 8y ago
      Except that most expensive AAA games don't have free counterparts...
      - LocalH 8y ago
        Not all fonts have free counterparts. “Serif” and “sans serif” don’t always mean fungible.
    - 8y ago
shurcooL 8y ago
I’m glad that Go Mono made the cut. I’ve been using it happily for a while, despite it being an underdog font.
rb808 8y ago
Awesome, am loving this one with colors on http://app.programmingfonts.org/#press-start-2p http://app.programmingfonts.org/#press-start-2p It would be nice to have some flags to show what the license is for each one.
- ChrisGranger 8y ago
  http://programmingfonts.org/list http://programmingfonts.org/list contains licensing information for each font, but I agree that it would be nice to see on the Test Drive page as well.
  - klageveen 8y ago
    Another thing I should integrate I guess. However, just as a general note, you can safely use every single font featured on app.programmingfonts.org for yourself.
rakic 8y ago
https://twitter.com/boletrone/status/1087225897244151810 https://twitter.com/boletrone/status/1087225897244151810
- jeremy_wiebe 8y ago
  Fonts seem to be a very a personal thing. There are demonstrably better and worse fonts, but at the end of the day, I would guess the there are half as many “best” (is favourite) fonts at my workplace as there are engineers. That said, I have to check those out you mention (never heard of any of them). Thanks. My current personal favourite is Hasklig.
ab_c 8y ago
None of the fonts in "programmingfonts.org" have ligatures so no thanks. https://www.slant.co/topics/5611/~monospace-programming-fonts-with-ligatures https://www.slant.co/topics/5611/~monospace-programming-font...
- ChrisGranger 8y ago
  Fira Code, Hasklig, Iosevka, and Monoid (from your link) are all on Programming Fonts.
- tzjmetron 8y ago
  I personally dislike ligatures, and find them too distracting.
angst 8y ago
Fira Mono link seems to be no longer served(redirects to general style guides page). Maybe you could link https://github.com/mozilla/Fira https://github.com/mozilla/Fira instead?
- decasteve 8y ago
  I believe this is a more recently updated link: https://github.com/bBoxType/FiraSans/ https://github.com/bBoxType/FiraSans/
  - klageveen 8y ago
    Good catch, I'll update the link. Both the Mozilla and the foundry's repo seem to have the same font, it kinda makes sense to link to the Mozilla one in this case.
keithnz 8y ago
I quite like IBM Plex Mono as a programming font... https://github.com/IBM/plex https://github.com/IBM/plex would be nice if the page has a way of making suggestions of fonts to add.
- hashtekar 8y ago
  Agree. It does seem to be in the repo though. You could submit a pull request for additions I suppose.
  - hashtekar 8y ago
    Oh, it's not in the to. My bad.
- ChrisGranger 8y ago
  There's a form at http://programmingfonts.org/ask http://programmingfonts.org/ask where you could suggest additional fonts to add.
- rakic 8y ago
  http://app.programmingfonts.org/#plex-mono http://app.programmingfonts.org/#plex-mono
- deltron3030 8y ago
  If you like that font, you could try out the mono version from iA Writer (a famous writing app) which they have released recently, it's based on plex but looks a bit better imo! https://ia.net/writer/blog/a-typographic-christmas https://ia.net/writer/blog/a-typographic-christmas
- satysin 8y ago
  I love Plex Mono also. It is on this site under Plex Mono although the info & download link is wrong.
- perenzo 8y ago
  It get's even better with ligatures for common coding sequences https://github.com/vikky49/patchedFonts-Ligatures https://github.com/vikky49/patchedFonts-Ligatures
ChrisGranger 8y ago
I like opening multiple tabs with different fonts and switching back and forth to make the differences more obvious. I've been experimenting with a variety of fonts in Sublime Text 3 on Linux, and I keep coming back to the default, which is apparently called emilbuS Mono, and looks like Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.
- evanrelf 8y ago
  emilbuS <=> Sublime :)
rypskar 8y ago
I am fascinated of how important font is for some, I tend to stick with the default font and not think about it. The only time I have really noticed a font is libre font (or what its name was) after installing LibreOffice, I did uninstall LibreOffice and bought MS Office instead because of that font
- fmeyer 8y ago
  Some fonts can be very annoying for those with astigmatism — especially when using contact lenses instead of glasses since they aren't always matching your prescription.
- ethelward 8y ago
  So instead of just chosing another font for the default style, you decided to thrash LO and buy MS Office? That seems a bit of an overreaction, no?
  - rypskar 8y ago
    The font was a big part of the reason. Maybe having a font where the spacing between some letters looks like a space between words say a bit about how the UX is prioritized. The money difference between LO and MS Office isn't much when you don't upgrade every year
betimsl 8y ago
I use IBM Plex. You should add it to the list, I think it's free.
- ChrisGranger 8y ago
  It's on the list already, under Plex Mono. http://app.programmingfonts.org/#plex-mono http://app.programmingfonts.org/#plex-mono
  - betimsl 8y ago
    Oh sorry. I didn't see it there.
me_bx 8y ago
Reporting a bug here as I see that the author is around: For some reason, switching fonts does not work on my browser. Firefox 64.0.2, windows 10 64 bits No error message in the console, and ublock origin plugin didn't block anything on the page. Opening the same page in Google Chrome worked well: font changes in the demo code whenever user clicks on a font in the list.
- davman 8y ago
  Working for me on the same environment
- strainer 8y ago
  Likely this setting has been disabled: View > Preferences > Language & Appearance > Advanced > Allow pages to choose their own fonts...
  - me_bx 8y ago
    Turns out it was something like this. The `Allow pages to choose their own fonts` option was enabled. However, a customization in my userContent.css prevented the font changes to be applied: pre { font-family: "DejaVu Sans Mono" !important; } Starting Firefox with a new profile showed that the site works correctly.
throwaway918237 8y ago
No love for gohu font? (http://font.gohu.org/ http://font.gohu.org/)
- dlkinney 8y ago
  Similarly, Terminus.[1] It's a fantastic bitmap[2] font and I find that I use it on all my low-DPI screens. I think it reads a little better than gohu, but agreed: there's no love for tiny fonts on OP's link... 1: https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/ https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/ 2: http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/ http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/
- klageveen 8y ago
  Lots of old school fonts aren't available in a format that browsers understand. A TTF version of Terminus is in there though. IIRC there was something wrong with the Gohu font files , I'll have to look if that's fixed nowadays.
ayoisaiah 8y ago
I've been using IBM Plex Mono¹ for the last couple of weeks. Switched from Source Code Pro, and I love it! [1]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Mono https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Mono
Stratoscope 8y ago
It looks like these are all monospaced fonts. I realize that most programmers use monospaced fonts, but I personally find proportional fonts to be much more readable and pleasing to my eye. I would be really interested in a similar font comparison that included proportional fonts that are suitable for programming. Right now my favorite is Trebuchet MS. This renders beautifully on the high-DPI displays I use, and it has easily-distinguished glyphs for the common mistakables like Il|. Its tilde is not very good though, so I used a font editor to swap in a better one. But I'm always interested to hear about other options! When I do have to use a monospaced font (e.g. in a terminal window), Liberation Mono is my favorite. Definitely worth a look if you like monospaced fonts.
- 1kGarand 8y ago
  Verdana used to be my go to proportional font when I was doing Java. Helped with long variable names and long horizontal lines. My buddies thought I was nuts, but I found it very legible. These days my eyes are dimming, so I dislike skinny fonts. Now I use DejaVu Sans Mono in _bold_ exclusively. Every now and then when HN does a programming font post, I try out different ones, but I always end up going back to DejaVu Sans Mono Bold.
  - Stratoscope 8y ago
    Like you, I'm not as young as I used to be. So I'm with you on the skinny fonts! One of my biggest pet peeves is web designers who think font-weight: 300; is a good idea. You might take a look at Trebuchet MS. One thing I like about it is that the strokes are nice and fat. At least on my high-DPI displays; haven't checked on a low or medium DPI display.
  - hmottestad 8y ago
    +1 for Verdana. Been using it for 3 years now. Couldn't be happier.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      For those who like Verdana, check this out. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/verdana-pro/9n8d67vhhdc2 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/verdana-pro/9n8d67vhhdc2 Coincidentally, I wonder if the license allows it to be downloaded and installed on other OSes, like the old "Microsoft core fonts" package that included Verdana.
chrismorgan 8y ago
My favourite for a few years now is a commercial font, Triplicate. It’s a true serif monospace font; every other monospace font I’ve encountered that is labelled “serif” is actually a slab serif. It has a proper italic face as well, which is a less rare, but it’s a functional italic face rather than ornamental. It comes with some interesting variants, most notably Poly which is not fully monospaced, adjusting the widths of characters like i to be a little narrower, and W to be a little wider. I like to use that for code display. https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- clappski 8y ago
  That website is possibly the most beautiful and ergonomic website I've ever used.
  - Eugeleo 8y ago
    And it's made with Racket! The author of the font has written a publishing platform called Pollen[1]. I'd recommend you to check it out! [1]: http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/
  - shittyadmin 8y ago
    You and I have very different definitions of beautiful and ergonomic - I don't like their table formatted pricing and I don't like that I have to scroll down to get to navigation.
- 1kGarand 8y ago
  It looks quite similar to golang font: https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts It has serifs and true italics. Might be an interesting free alternative.
  - ChrisGranger 8y ago
grogenaut 8y ago
it'd be cool if I could just use the down arrow to move down the list of fonts instead of the mouse
miguelrochefort 8y ago
My Eve code sure would look good with these fonts...
colordrops 8y ago
I really enjoy the Nerd Font pack, as it adds all kinds of symbols that are great for augmenting text editors like Vim: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts Then your editor can look like this: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/ryanoasis/vim-devicons/screenshots/v0.10.x/overall-screenshot.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/ryanoasis/vim-devicon... It's not all just for looks. For example you get icons for file types so it's also useful. My favorite is the Nerd Font version of Droid Sans Mono.
- lprd 8y ago
  Also a huge fan of the nerd font project!
- h1d 8y ago
  Works on terminal with patched 'exa' as a replacement of 'ls' too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17883833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17883833
me551ah 8y ago
I'm surprised that the list doesn't mention consolas. It ships default with visual studio and it's so good that I use it on arch Linux as my terminal font and with intellij. It was designed with programming in mind and has some nifty characteristics like a slash through zero. This list also misses out on 'operator mono' which is a well thought out font for programming.
- ratsimihah 8y ago
  Thanks for mentioning it! I just compared Consolas with the default Menlo along with Hack, and I do like the roundedness in Consolas.
- ChrisGranger 8y ago
  Consolas is a proprietary font, and this list includes only free and/or open source fonts. It does include the similar Inconsolata.
  - raphlinus 8y ago
    Though Inconsolata was inspired by Consolas, I wouldn't consider it all that similar. For example, the digits in Inconsolata are much closer to the Franklin Gothic model. Also, Consolas has excellent hinting for Windows, while Inconsolata was originally designed with no hinting at all. They're not drop-in replacements.
    - Jaruzel 8y ago
      Seconded, Inconsolata at small sizes looks awful on Windows. I'm surprised that so many of these 'programming' fonts do not have dotted or slashed zeros. For a programming font, that's a must-have requirement for me. I edited Droid Sans Mono, so that its zero had a slash, and now I use it as my go-to font for all my IDEs and terminals. However after browsing this lot, I'm tempted to give Go Font a try.
    - beefsack 8y ago
      For those unaware, raphlinus actually created Inconsolata.
cpeterso 8y ago
I'd like to see an elimination tournament of these so you can two fonts head-to-head and vote for your preferred until you discover you favorite. Identifont is a similar system. It uses a twenty-questions style format to identify an unknown font. http://www.identifont.com/ http://www.identifont.com/
- klageveen 8y ago
  That's a really cool idea. You know, the website is on GitHub, if anyone wants to contribute a PR I'm all ears ;)
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    We all know 3270 will win ;-)
- AlphaWeaver 8y ago
  I actually did a quick hack a few weeks ago to build an "elimination" style tool for making decisions. The code is here [0] and the tool is here [1]. Might be able to adapt it to something like this. [0]: https://github.com/weaversam8/bracket-based-decision-making https://github.com/weaversam8/bracket-based-decision-making [1]: https://bracket-based-decision-making.firebaseapp.com/ https://bracket-based-decision-making.firebaseapp.com/
- ___alt 8y ago
  That would be neat, browsing through several dozen fonts to find the right pick is a bit overwhelming, although one can argue it's a self-imposed burden.
0xBA5ED 8y ago
I like the 'M+' fonts for C++ code. Nice and compact to allow more characters to fit comfortably on a line.
huy-nguyen 8y ago
I’ll put in a mention for Dank Mono. I’ve been using it for a year and love it (https://dank.sh https://dank.sh). It’s like Operator Mono but much cheaper.
- pixard 8y ago
  I own both and actually prefer Dank Mono. The lowercase f is just so nice.
- jgalentine007 8y ago
  This is what I've been using the last year as well. At first I felt silly paying for a font but I really like it - having cursive fonts in VsCode does seem to help with my comprehension and breaks up the monotony a bit.
vackosar 8y ago
OCR-A font was made to be recognizable by 60s OCR tech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A
- ignaloidas 8y ago
  It's machine first, so human readability falls. Though there's the benefit that you will newer wonder what the letter is at all as they are so distinct.
heyjudy 8y ago
I've tried dozens. Monaco or Source Code Pro You also have to try them in your terminal or editor, because on the web isn't the same experience.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  Browsers tend to use their own inbuilt font rendering code, which can be different from the OS. I know for a fact that some of the fonts shown at app.programmingfonts.org do not render that well inside apps on Windows 10.
daxterspeed 8y ago
I think a lot of these fonts deserve a little blurb about their history and purpose. For example Liberation Mono (version 2+) and Cousine are fundamentally the same font available under the same SIL Open Font License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts#Distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts#Distribution Personally I use and recommend Liberation Mono / Cousine at 9pt / 12px. I've been using this font for years so it's just ended up what I'm the most comfortable with for both reading and writing.
- klageveen 8y ago
  That's a good point. I usually have a little blurb like that on the blog, but I have been trying to integrate more info about each font into the test drive thing. There are lot's of "family relations" like that between fonts.
rcarmo 8y ago
I pretty much standardized on Fira Code over the past few years, although the ligatures seem to delay rendering a bit. But overall I like that lowercase letters have nice, readable descenders and hints on HIDPI displays, and that my editor now looks exactly the same on Windows and Mac.
Topolomancer 8y ago
This is interesting, but I would like a more 'guided' tour, maybe backed up by some usage data, as well as some statistics about readability and so on.
- Stratoscope 8y ago
  Now that is an interesting perspective! It's hard for me to imagine that I would choose a font based on usage data and statistics: "25% more coders use Inconsolata than Verdana, and they suffer 3% less eyestrain as a result." How would you even measure such a thing? A font that works well on a low-DPI display may not be the same one that looks great on a high-DPI display. And one person's eyes are not my eyes. I look at a font, try using it in my work, and either I like or I don't like it. Even if I do like it, I will probably find some flaws in it and fix them in a font editor. Or maybe I don't and just live with it. I always enjoy comparing notes with people about what fonts we like to use. But this seems like personal preference, not science.
shmerl 8y ago
I've been using DejaVu Sans Mono for quite some time. It's a nice font. It used to be the default monospace font in KDE, until they switched to Noto Mono. Autohinting setting for fontconfig makes it look better for me:  <match target="font"> <test name="family"> <string>DejaVu Sans Mono</string> </test> <edit name="autohint" mode="assign"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> </match>
- simias 8y ago
  I'm in the same boat, every time one of these threads pop up I try a few different fonts recommended here but I always end up going back to DejaVu. It think it looks pretty good, it has good Unicode coverage, it's supported out of the box on most distros... It's weird because I can be pretty snobbish and opinionated with a lot of programming-related stuff (I use a very expensive keyboard, a large 4k screen, a heavily customized editor and window manager etc...) but when it comes to fonts I really have a hard time finding a real improvement with some of the very expensive fonts people are recommending in this thread compared to good old DevaVu. I would be very interested to read an article that would explain in details what makes certain fonts better or worse than others, especially for programming.
  - platz 8y ago
    I switched from using devavu for years finally to iosevka
    - shittyadmin 8y ago
      Had a look at iosevka - it definitely seems nicer than many of the others, but it still feels too vertical when compared to DejaVu in my opinion. Is there something that sold you on it?
      - platz 8y ago
        Well, it certainly is more vertical. The increased x-height allows it to be readable at small sizes (and fit more horizontally) which looks great in the terminal and editor, but maybe a bit odd on the test page.
tigen 8y ago
The Terminus font doesn't seem to render properly there. Possibly it's just my browser but I use that font all the time in the terminal. Here it looks glitchy/aliased or something.
- drey08 8y ago
  It's one of the reasons why I still haven't fully switched to VSCode. There doesn't seem to be a way to disable antialiasing in VSCode to make this font look good, as far as I can tell.
  - klageveen 8y ago
    You can uncheck the AA option on programmingfonts.org though. I need to make something to make fonts render at their “proper” size when needed...
Hackbraten 8y ago
Slightly OT: Iosevka Term Light is my favorite font for the terminal. It looks pretty on a HiDPI screen. Also, it’s the only font that wouldn’t break box-drawing Unicode glyphs for me, e. g. those used by the tree command.
tomoya 8y ago
Recommend a mixed font in Chinese environment YaHei Consolas Hybrid
make3 8y ago
Dude where is the Python support, the fastest growing language after Javascript, and much bigger than some of the other included languages
- klageveen 8y ago
  It's just a default set from some release of CodeMirror. I guess I should upgrade that..
miguelmota 8y ago
This is awesome. Note to site owner; I'm getting "Mixed Content" warnings because some scripts are served over HTTP instead of HTTPS.
- klageveen 8y ago
  Thanks! It's on my list to actually get https set up for it because originally GitHub pages didn't support that.
mesaframe 8y ago
Is there any theme like ambiance theme available on Visual Studio Code? https://screenshots.firefox.com/9wlM0C9RCyou4Rk9/app.programmingfonts.org https://screenshots.firefox.com/9wlM0C9RCyou4Rk9/app.program...
jve 8y ago
Argh, why hijack my browser back button and history? :/ Otherwise, thanks for nice list to quickly compare those fonts :)
tharwan 8y ago
I think Mensch is missing: https://robey.lag.net/2010/06/21/mensch-font.html https://robey.lag.net/2010/06/21/mensch-font.html
- klageveen 8y ago
  I think it too!
enriquto 8y ago
for bitmap fonts it should disable the resize option (or at least quantize it to the sizes where it makes sense)
martijn_himself 8y ago
I don't own a Mac at the minute but I must say Monaco is hands down the best programming font I've worked with. Most of the fonts on this list don't even come close.
- lispm 8y ago
  Apple long ago chose 'Menlo' and it now uses in some applications (Xcode, Terminal) the font 'SF Mono'.
mkesper 8y ago
Right now there is another font designed for legibility on HN frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18946601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18946601
rawfael 8y ago
This is very nice. I'd like to see the Solarized color scheme and Apple's SF Mono.
rbanffy 8y ago
I love the way Consola Mono and Nova Mono remind me of Smalltalk's Cream font. <3
rbanffy 8y ago
I like the way Go Mono fixes Luxi Mono's "0", but I like Luxi's "g" better.
dspillett 8y ago
A handy list and preview. It might be nice to include some detail as to the features provided by some of the fonts on the font list, if it can be done without making the UI too busy. I'm thinking indicators for things like: true italic provided (instead of leaving the OS to use false italics), true bold provided, programming ligatures (as seen in those like Fira Code), ... Perhaps filters too.
- toyg 8y ago
  Ligatures could probably be simply shown by adding one or two of the most common ones ( <=, != etc...)
  - gjm11 8y ago
    Maybe it's changed in the last hour or two, but for me it does indicate when ligatures are present -- in the list on the lest, under the name of each font there's a line giving name, date, and some features -- one of which is "ligatures".
    - dspillett 8y ago
      So there is. Not sure if I missed that earlier or if ligatures have been added since. I remember seeing sans/serif/bitmap there but not ligatures.
    - klageveen 8y ago
      Fonts with ligatures are indicated as such, but I’ve yet to add all the other metadata. I do have the data, just need ideas on how to surface it in the UI with too much clutter. I also have to add search, keyboard navigation, etc. I’ll probably have things to do here well beyond retirement ;)
TomasSedovic 8y ago
This is a really cool site, thanks! It also helped me understand something about the font sizes that always puzzled me (but never enough to actually look it up). All of the fonts there have the size of 16, but some are clearly bigger than others. Compare e.g. Inconsolata and Meslo: http://app.programmingfonts.org/#inconsolata http://app.programmingfonts.org/#inconsolata http://app.programmingfonts.org/#meslo http://app.programmingfonts.org/#meslo Having them side by side, you can see that they contain the same vertical amount of space. Inconsolata's glyphs are smaller, but they're still in the box of the same height. It does seem that the "font size" only refers to the height, though. The width is clearly variable. To anyone who actually understands this properly: is the above correct or is that just an artefact of how the website renders the text?
- Kaibeezy 8y ago
  What you’re noticing is the variation in “x-height”, that is, the height of the middle part of the lowercase letterforms, not counting ascenders/descenders. Width can always vary. Combinations of greater width and x-height make the letters look bigger. At least, that’s the way I’ve always understood it. This image shows it clearly: http://kapundahigh.weebly.com/uploads/6/1/5/4/61545621/xheight_1_orig.gif http://kapundahigh.weebly.com/uploads/6/1/5/4/61545621/xheig...
- klageveen 8y ago
  A font’s dimensions at a given “font-size” are actually completely up to the designer. Something like x-height can only be determined by rendering and then measuring. Editors tend to be full of character measuring code. x-height also doesn’t say anything about the length of descenders and ascenders. Some fonts are exactly the same size though, there a bunch of variations of Courier to be used as a replacement (for licensing reasons). If they’re not designed to the same dimensions you cannot be sure text will fit on the page with the other font. And if they’re the same size they can still look larger or smaller by a wide margin. It’s a wonderful world :)
h1d 8y ago
Kudos for including BPmono. I have been using it as my favorite programming font for 10 years which somehow gets no attention when people talk about their favorite fonts. I've tried many of the more famous ones but the clarity is simply good.
fastflo 8y ago
good old misc fixed is missing? https://pasteboard.co/HXsWkSo.png https://pasteboard.co/HXsWkSo.png
interlocutor 8y ago
No one has mentioned Lucida Sans Typewriter. It was the default console font on Solaris, and it was may favorite code font for more than a decade. I even made a Windows version of that font, for my own use, using a bitmapped font editor. Here's a screenshot of Solaris showing that font: http://agilo.acjs.net/files/screenshot_solaris.png http://agilo.acjs.net/files/screenshot_solaris.png You can buy it from Adobe: https://www.fonts.com/font/adobe/lucida-sans-typewriter/regular https://www.fonts.com/font/adobe/lucida-sans-typewriter/regu...
- idoubtit 8y ago
  My first test on a monotype font targets similar characters, especially at small sizes: 0O 1l ~- }) … There is no tilde in Lucida's snapshot, but I would rate the font very low on the readability of the other characters. The other parameters (serif, form of the "g", etc) are of no importance to me if the first test fails.
- signal11 8y ago
  Ah, I mentioned it a little while ago in another comment thread. Microsoft bundled it with older versions of Office and Windows, and is included in their TrueType Font Pack[1] [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/lucida-sans-typewriter https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/lucida...
  - dumol 8y ago
    Also in the JRE downloads at https://www.java.com/download/ https://www.java.com/download/ in the lib/fonts sub-dir since forever.
mjaniczek 8y ago
target="_blank" would certainly help usability of the "Info & Download" links. Thanks for the website, klageveen!
- klageveen 8y ago
  Don’t get me started on target=“_blank” and UX ;)
alex_hitchins 8y ago
This is a great resource, but doesn't come up with anything that beats Monaco for me. Does anyone have any known good reference sites for going about creating your own font? I've thought about this a lot yet never had the time to do. I think creating my own would be incredibly cool!
hnarn 8y ago
It drives me crazy when fonts look at the old convention of "strike through zero" and for some reason decides they need to be different from the convention and allow the strike to pass the edges of the zero circle. "Anka/Coder" in the linked article is guilty of this. When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero, it's a Danish or Norwegian "Ö" (Ø). It's been a part of their alphabet for centuries. The whole purpose of the "strike through zero" is to stop it from being mixed up with Omega. By badly thought out design and a need to be different for no reason, you just returned to square one, because the font is now unreadable for anyone that knows or works with the letter Ø.
- andai 8y ago
  ∅
- uasm 8y ago
  > "When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero, it's a Danish or Norwegian "Ö" (Ø). It's been a part of their alphabet for centuries." You can't please all the people, all of the time. There are ~21 million people living in Scandinavia - and for them, that could indeed be somewhat of an issue. What about the rest of the planet? > "By badly thought out design and a need to be different for no reason, you just returned to square one, because the font is now unreadable for anyone that knows or works with the letter Ø." Out of curiosity, what would you consider to be a better design?
  - detaro 8y ago
    > What would you consider to be a better design then? > > "When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero,
    - hinkley 8y ago
      Well, at least he wasn't belligerent. Noticing a lot of threads like that on Reddit lately. Hope it doesn't spread.
  - 8y ago
jimijazz 8y ago
Is it me or Bitstream Vera Sans Mono looks exactly the same as DejaVu Mono ?
- uwu 8y ago
  from wikipedia: > The DejaVu fonts are modifications of the Bitstream Vera fonts designed for greater coverage of Unicode, as well as providing more styles.
ricanontherun 8y ago
Surprised by how bad these fonts look with languages other than JS.
coldcode 8y ago
Is there some way to view them in light mode? I am not a fan of the dark.
- kamek 8y ago
  You can select the colour scheme from a menu in the bottom left (including several light schemes).
- ChrisGranger 8y ago
  Under the font size selector, there's a theme selector.
- kps 8y ago
  Is there a color scheme that doesn't look like a tornado hit a paint factory? I couldn't find one.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
moolc 8y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhMRAjX95k0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhMRAjX95k0 is the way that helped me selecting new monospaced font
no_wizard 8y ago
Seems worth plugging nerd fonts if someone has not done so already. It’s a great place to get patched fonts like this (most of them support ligatures for Instance and are based on a lot of these fonts) https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/blob/master/readme.md https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/blob/master/readme.m...
hivacruz 8y ago
Works terrible for me with Safari or Chrome. Can't start with <?php, can't copy/paste some code.
jswizzy 8y ago
I wish there was a filter. It would be nice to filter out fonts that are not mono typed and don't have ligatures.
- klageveen 8y ago
  They’re all mono though ;)
blunte 8y ago
Great site, but one request: Please make the up/down keyboard arrows switch to the prev/next font (rather than just scrolling the list of fonts). That way I could keep my eyes on the code window to really feel the change. Currently, having to visually bounce from code window to font selection window and back slows me down and makes it harder for me to compare fonts.
- kps 8y ago
  Tab, Tab, Return.
- neurotrace 8y ago
  I just whipped this userscript together that you might like. J/K for next/previous font A/Z to increase/decrease font size S/X to increase/decrease spacing T to toggle anti-aliasing https://gist.github.com/MCluck90/1cbcbb615eca18466b8be6c7ec003df0 https://gist.github.com/MCluck90/1cbcbb615eca18466b8be6c7ec0...
- jay_kyburz 8y ago
  I think it would also be good to mark them as you look down the list, then filter the list and work down it again, marking more until you are left with just one.
  - tripzilch 8y ago
    Yes, something this would be very useful for actually comparing the fonts. Google Web Fonts has something similar, you can select a bunch of fonts from the long list, that you like from first glances, and then compare only that selection with sample texts. For this list of programming fonts, I could first select (mark) a bunch that just match my general taste (shape, weight, x-height). Then I would be able to easily switch between my selection/shortlist to inspect more detailed differences such as how numbers are aligned with respect to brackets and operators, or whatever. Currently it's a bit hard to do if you have to keep a mental shortlist of fonts you like enough for further inspection, to remember which ones to check back on (especially if you see some names for the first time). Regardless, it's a really cool site, great resource, and already the comparing mechanism is pretty nice!
Dowwie 8y ago
I'm so adjusted to Iosevka that anything else looks really weird to me..
opk 8y ago
It'd be good to have details of unicode coverage on this site, i.e how many glyphs in various major blocks are covered (e.g greek, cyrillic, box drawing, mathematical symbols etc).
- klageveen 8y ago
  The problem here is that the information isn’t always available. If the docs don’t mention box drawing characters, or powerline symbols the font may still have them. Also, a lot of sources mention the number of glyphs but not the Unicode ranges that are covered.
mshenfield 8y ago
I loved traipsing through the different fonts to see what they did. I discovered some font-features I wasn't aware of: * bitmapped + ligatured fonts - you can have both! * sans-serif normal, serif italics - Italicized words were serif-ed. "Latin Modern Mono" is an example. Also, Donald Knuth made that font - did you know Donald Knuth made a font? Really cool work, thanks for making this.
- klageveen 8y ago
  Awesome feedback, thanks!
mmgutz 8y ago
For those who want to quickly compare two fonts, simply click on the desired fonts and click forward and back button on your browser.
pmarreck 8y ago
Fira Code with ligature support turned on in your editor, or GTFO. LOVE. IT. https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
mortenjorck 8y ago
Something not in the list that would make a good addition is iA’s (makers of the popular iA Writer app) fork of IBM Plex Mono. They took Plex and redesigned some of the more quirky, IBM-brand glyphs such as loosening the tight radii on the descenders of ’t’ and ‘j’, and built some fairly novel duospace and quad-space versions: https://ia.net/writer/blog/a-typographic-christmas https://ia.net/writer/blog/a-typographic-christmas The GitHub link is somewhat buried in the post: https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts
thesimp 8y ago
I use a very simple test to verify if fonts are usable in programmer/technical environments: - check the readability of lower and upper case "i" (india) against the number "1" (one)and the lower and upper case "l" (lima). - Check the readability of the lower and upper case "o" (oscar) against the number "0". - check if the font can be used monospaced with being reasonable to good readability. If it passes those checks then it is often good enough for me.
- Syzygies 8y ago
  - how much code can one fit on a screen, still maximum legibiilty? - Is there a lighter weight variant from which one can steal ()[]{} ? Essential for Lisp programming, nice for every language. My current winner is Roboto Mono Regular, with brackets borrowed from Roboto Mono Light. The font disappears on me (attitude takes bandwidth) and one would never know I played with the brackets till one goes back to another font, and it becomes obvious brackets on a Retina display have no business having the same weight as body text. Sample ('Zoom Out' for realistic scale): https://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/etc/RobotoLisp.png https://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/etc/RobotoLisp.png
  - O_H_E 8y ago
    Interesting. It really look nicer
  - mthoms 8y ago
    Very interesting. I've never heard of this idea of making some specific glyphs thinner, but it makes perfect sense. I'm curious, is this something you discovered on your own? I'm definitely going to try this out.
coleifer 8y ago
I put together a list of my own, including screenshots with a small code snippet. Might be helpful as this list does include some that are not listed on programmingfonts.org: http://charlesleifer.com/blog/monospace-font-favorites/ http://charlesleifer.com/blog/monospace-font-favorites/
tomc1985 8y ago
Default size 16, spacing 1.4? Good lord that is way too big... (props for remembering set values between reloads though)
vzaliva 8y ago
It would be nice to see some Unicode things in the example, like arrows, various math symbols, etc. I am looking for a good programming font with the support of math symbols.
nielsbot 8y ago
Cool! But I would love to have Input Sans included... (Not just Input Mono).
boterock 8y ago
I recently found a font named "NSimSun" when customizing the windows console, and I am currently using it for programming. It looks like a serif font but it has finer details like a non-monospace font. I think it is because it was made for asian text, and each latin character does half the width of an eastern character. Here is the docs for the font: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/simsun#simsun-extb https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/simsun... It feels unsupported overall, but I set it up in the terminal and text editors and I am happy with it, It looks like a proper font, and not a dumbed-down-to-align-to-pixels font.Also there are some missing glyphs like áéíóú, but maybe if more people use it, MS will improve the font =)
Soroush 8y ago
Excellent website! May I suggest: 1. Show an indicator which font is currently selected. 2. Allow users to save their favorites, so they can find what they like faster next time they visit. Thanks for sharing it, it's very useful :)

712 points by ChrisGranger 8y ago

Probably a very un-used font for programming, but my favorite is Operator Mono (Book Italic) - https://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/styles/ https://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/styles/ - Strange to be using an italic to code in, but I quite like it. edit: someone has actually added ligatures to operator mono if that's your thing (https://github.com/kiliman/operator-mono-lig https://github.com/kiliman/operator-mono-lig)

fxfan 8y ago
600usd is a bit steep- no disrespect to the designer.
- soperj 8y ago
  It is $199 for 1 computer. Don't know where you see 600?
  - brennebeck 8y ago
    I’d imagine from the pricing for the complete font, which is that price: http://s.rnbk.org/Photo-2019-01-21-14-10-2jezMYmKLZXqYskTrz6M.jpg http://s.rnbk.org/Photo-2019-01-21-14-10-2jezMYmKLZXqYskTrz6... Though, the price for the Mono-only (bottom of sidebar) does match what you said. So I’m guessing it’s just misread/UX. Edit: sentence clarity
  - number6 8y ago
    Best Value Bundle. But to be honest even $200 is too much for my taste

ilrwbwrkhv 8y ago

very good site...... love it

klageveen 8y ago
Thanks!

Jerry2 8y ago

One of my favorites is PragmataPro [0] (with powerline glyphs) and I'm sad it's not there. I guess they can't use proprietary fonts. PragmataPro was so weird when I started using it but it has grown on me and now I have a hard time switching to a terminal that uses something else. In any case, if you're like me and you look at the terminal screen for hours on end every single day, find some font that won't tire your eyes and is optimized for your screen. If you have to squint or double-check letters or numbers because they're unclear, increase the size or switch to a different font. [0] https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/

gnulinux 8y ago
Huh. Not to sound cheap, but it really seems unnecessary to me to spend 60 Eur for a font, when I already have really good fonts like Inconsolata in my reach for free. Is font really that important, do you think? This is an honest question, please don't think I'm sarcastic.
- Jerry2 8y ago
  That's an average price of a AAA game, right? And what kind of utility do you get from that? Just did a quick check... I bought it in Sept of 2012, 2323 days ago. $70 / (2323 day * 6 hrs/day) = $0.005/hr Did I get my money's worth (and mind you, I paid less than that.. I'm just going by today's prices)? I think I did. It all depends on how you value things.
  - darkcha0s 8y ago
    Except that most expensive AAA games don't have free counterparts...
    - LocalH 8y ago
      Not all fonts have free counterparts. “Serif” and “sans serif” don’t always mean fungible.
  - 8y ago

shurcooL 8y ago

I’m glad that Go Mono made the cut. I’ve been using it happily for a while, despite it being an underdog font.

rb808 8y ago

Awesome, am loving this one with colors on http://app.programmingfonts.org/#press-start-2p http://app.programmingfonts.org/#press-start-2p It would be nice to have some flags to show what the license is for each one.

ChrisGranger 8y ago
http://programmingfonts.org/list http://programmingfonts.org/list contains licensing information for each font, but I agree that it would be nice to see on the Test Drive page as well.
- klageveen 8y ago
  Another thing I should integrate I guess. However, just as a general note, you can safely use every single font featured on app.programmingfonts.org for yourself.

rakic 8y ago

https://twitter.com/boletrone/status/1087225897244151810 https://twitter.com/boletrone/status/1087225897244151810

jeremy_wiebe 8y ago
Fonts seem to be a very a personal thing. There are demonstrably better and worse fonts, but at the end of the day, I would guess the there are half as many “best” (is favourite) fonts at my workplace as there are engineers. That said, I have to check those out you mention (never heard of any of them). Thanks. My current personal favourite is Hasklig.

ab_c 8y ago

None of the fonts in "programmingfonts.org" have ligatures so no thanks. https://www.slant.co/topics/5611/~monospace-programming-fonts-with-ligatures https://www.slant.co/topics/5611/~monospace-programming-font...

ChrisGranger 8y ago
Fira Code, Hasklig, Iosevka, and Monoid (from your link) are all on Programming Fonts.
tzjmetron 8y ago
I personally dislike ligatures, and find them too distracting.

angst 8y ago

Fira Mono link seems to be no longer served(redirects to general style guides page). Maybe you could link https://github.com/mozilla/Fira https://github.com/mozilla/Fira instead?

decasteve 8y ago
I believe this is a more recently updated link: https://github.com/bBoxType/FiraSans/ https://github.com/bBoxType/FiraSans/
- klageveen 8y ago
  Good catch, I'll update the link. Both the Mozilla and the foundry's repo seem to have the same font, it kinda makes sense to link to the Mozilla one in this case.

keithnz 8y ago

I quite like IBM Plex Mono as a programming font... https://github.com/IBM/plex https://github.com/IBM/plex would be nice if the page has a way of making suggestions of fonts to add.

hashtekar 8y ago
Agree. It does seem to be in the repo though. You could submit a pull request for additions I suppose.
- hashtekar 8y ago
  Oh, it's not in the to. My bad.
ChrisGranger 8y ago
There's a form at http://programmingfonts.org/ask http://programmingfonts.org/ask where you could suggest additional fonts to add.
rakic 8y ago
http://app.programmingfonts.org/#plex-mono http://app.programmingfonts.org/#plex-mono
deltron3030 8y ago
If you like that font, you could try out the mono version from iA Writer (a famous writing app) which they have released recently, it's based on plex but looks a bit better imo! https://ia.net/writer/blog/a-typographic-christmas https://ia.net/writer/blog/a-typographic-christmas
satysin 8y ago
I love Plex Mono also. It is on this site under Plex Mono although the info & download link is wrong.
perenzo 8y ago
It get's even better with ligatures for common coding sequences https://github.com/vikky49/patchedFonts-Ligatures https://github.com/vikky49/patchedFonts-Ligatures

ChrisGranger 8y ago

I like opening multiple tabs with different fonts and switching back and forth to make the differences more obvious. I've been experimenting with a variety of fonts in Sublime Text 3 on Linux, and I keep coming back to the default, which is apparently called emilbuS Mono, and looks like Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.

evanrelf 8y ago
emilbuS <=> Sublime :)

rypskar 8y ago

I am fascinated of how important font is for some, I tend to stick with the default font and not think about it. The only time I have really noticed a font is libre font (or what its name was) after installing LibreOffice, I did uninstall LibreOffice and bought MS Office instead because of that font

fmeyer 8y ago
Some fonts can be very annoying for those with astigmatism — especially when using contact lenses instead of glasses since they aren't always matching your prescription.
ethelward 8y ago
So instead of just chosing another font for the default style, you decided to thrash LO and buy MS Office? That seems a bit of an overreaction, no?
- rypskar 8y ago
  The font was a big part of the reason. Maybe having a font where the spacing between some letters looks like a space between words say a bit about how the UX is prioritized. The money difference between LO and MS Office isn't much when you don't upgrade every year

betimsl 8y ago

I use IBM Plex. You should add it to the list, I think it's free.

ChrisGranger 8y ago
It's on the list already, under Plex Mono. http://app.programmingfonts.org/#plex-mono http://app.programmingfonts.org/#plex-mono
- betimsl 8y ago
  Oh sorry. I didn't see it there.

me_bx 8y ago

Reporting a bug here as I see that the author is around: For some reason, switching fonts does not work on my browser. Firefox 64.0.2, windows 10 64 bits No error message in the console, and ublock origin plugin didn't block anything on the page. Opening the same page in Google Chrome worked well: font changes in the demo code whenever user clicks on a font in the list.

davman 8y ago
Working for me on the same environment
strainer 8y ago
Likely this setting has been disabled: View > Preferences > Language & Appearance > Advanced > Allow pages to choose their own fonts...
- me_bx 8y ago
  Turns out it was something like this. The `Allow pages to choose their own fonts` option was enabled. However, a customization in my userContent.css prevented the font changes to be applied: pre { font-family: "DejaVu Sans Mono" !important; } Starting Firefox with a new profile showed that the site works correctly.

throwaway918237 8y ago

No love for gohu font? (http://font.gohu.org/ http://font.gohu.org/)

dlkinney 8y ago
Similarly, Terminus.[1] It's a fantastic bitmap[2] font and I find that I use it on all my low-DPI screens. I think it reads a little better than gohu, but agreed: there's no love for tiny fonts on OP's link... 1: https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/ https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/ 2: http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/ http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/
klageveen 8y ago
Lots of old school fonts aren't available in a format that browsers understand. A TTF version of Terminus is in there though. IIRC there was something wrong with the Gohu font files , I'll have to look if that's fixed nowadays.

ayoisaiah 8y ago

I've been using IBM Plex Mono¹ for the last couple of weeks. Switched from Source Code Pro, and I love it! [1]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Mono https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Mono

Stratoscope 8y ago

It looks like these are all monospaced fonts. I realize that most programmers use monospaced fonts, but I personally find proportional fonts to be much more readable and pleasing to my eye. I would be really interested in a similar font comparison that included proportional fonts that are suitable for programming. Right now my favorite is Trebuchet MS. This renders beautifully on the high-DPI displays I use, and it has easily-distinguished glyphs for the common mistakables like Il|. Its tilde is not very good though, so I used a font editor to swap in a better one. But I'm always interested to hear about other options! When I do have to use a monospaced font (e.g. in a terminal window), Liberation Mono is my favorite. Definitely worth a look if you like monospaced fonts.

1kGarand 8y ago
Verdana used to be my go to proportional font when I was doing Java. Helped with long variable names and long horizontal lines. My buddies thought I was nuts, but I found it very legible. These days my eyes are dimming, so I dislike skinny fonts. Now I use DejaVu Sans Mono in _bold_ exclusively. Every now and then when HN does a programming font post, I try out different ones, but I always end up going back to DejaVu Sans Mono Bold.
- Stratoscope 8y ago
  Like you, I'm not as young as I used to be. So I'm with you on the skinny fonts! One of my biggest pet peeves is web designers who think font-weight: 300; is a good idea. You might take a look at Trebuchet MS. One thing I like about it is that the strokes are nice and fat. At least on my high-DPI displays; haven't checked on a low or medium DPI display.
- hmottestad 8y ago
  +1 for Verdana. Been using it for 3 years now. Couldn't be happier.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    For those who like Verdana, check this out. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/verdana-pro/9n8d67vhhdc2 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/verdana-pro/9n8d67vhhdc2 Coincidentally, I wonder if the license allows it to be downloaded and installed on other OSes, like the old "Microsoft core fonts" package that included Verdana.

chrismorgan 8y ago

My favourite for a few years now is a commercial font, Triplicate. It’s a true serif monospace font; every other monospace font I’ve encountered that is labelled “serif” is actually a slab serif. It has a proper italic face as well, which is a less rare, but it’s a functional italic face rather than ornamental. It comes with some interesting variants, most notably Poly which is not fully monospaced, adjusting the widths of characters like i to be a little narrower, and W to be a little wider. I like to use that for code display. https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
clappski 8y ago
That website is possibly the most beautiful and ergonomic website I've ever used.
- Eugeleo 8y ago
  And it's made with Racket! The author of the font has written a publishing platform called Pollen[1]. I'd recommend you to check it out! [1]: http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/
- shittyadmin 8y ago
  You and I have very different definitions of beautiful and ergonomic - I don't like their table formatted pricing and I don't like that I have to scroll down to get to navigation.
1kGarand 8y ago
It looks quite similar to golang font: https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts It has serifs and true italics. Might be an interesting free alternative.
- ChrisGranger 8y ago

grogenaut 8y ago

it'd be cool if I could just use the down arrow to move down the list of fonts instead of the mouse

miguelrochefort 8y ago

My Eve code sure would look good with these fonts...

colordrops 8y ago

I really enjoy the Nerd Font pack, as it adds all kinds of symbols that are great for augmenting text editors like Vim: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts Then your editor can look like this: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/ryanoasis/vim-devicons/screenshots/v0.10.x/overall-screenshot.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/ryanoasis/vim-devicon... It's not all just for looks. For example you get icons for file types so it's also useful. My favorite is the Nerd Font version of Droid Sans Mono.

lprd 8y ago
Also a huge fan of the nerd font project!
h1d 8y ago
Works on terminal with patched 'exa' as a replacement of 'ls' too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17883833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17883833

me551ah 8y ago

I'm surprised that the list doesn't mention consolas. It ships default with visual studio and it's so good that I use it on arch Linux as my terminal font and with intellij. It was designed with programming in mind and has some nifty characteristics like a slash through zero. This list also misses out on 'operator mono' which is a well thought out font for programming.

ratsimihah 8y ago
Thanks for mentioning it! I just compared Consolas with the default Menlo along with Hack, and I do like the roundedness in Consolas.
ChrisGranger 8y ago
Consolas is a proprietary font, and this list includes only free and/or open source fonts. It does include the similar Inconsolata.
- raphlinus 8y ago
  Though Inconsolata was inspired by Consolas, I wouldn't consider it all that similar. For example, the digits in Inconsolata are much closer to the Franklin Gothic model. Also, Consolas has excellent hinting for Windows, while Inconsolata was originally designed with no hinting at all. They're not drop-in replacements.
  - Jaruzel 8y ago
    Seconded, Inconsolata at small sizes looks awful on Windows. I'm surprised that so many of these 'programming' fonts do not have dotted or slashed zeros. For a programming font, that's a must-have requirement for me. I edited Droid Sans Mono, so that its zero had a slash, and now I use it as my go-to font for all my IDEs and terminals. However after browsing this lot, I'm tempted to give Go Font a try.
  - beefsack 8y ago
    For those unaware, raphlinus actually created Inconsolata.

cpeterso 8y ago

I'd like to see an elimination tournament of these so you can two fonts head-to-head and vote for your preferred until you discover you favorite. Identifont is a similar system. It uses a twenty-questions style format to identify an unknown font. http://www.identifont.com/ http://www.identifont.com/

klageveen 8y ago
That's a really cool idea. You know, the website is on GitHub, if anyone wants to contribute a PR I'm all ears ;)
- rbanffy 8y ago
  We all know 3270 will win ;-)
AlphaWeaver 8y ago
I actually did a quick hack a few weeks ago to build an "elimination" style tool for making decisions. The code is here [0] and the tool is here [1]. Might be able to adapt it to something like this. [0]: https://github.com/weaversam8/bracket-based-decision-making https://github.com/weaversam8/bracket-based-decision-making [1]: https://bracket-based-decision-making.firebaseapp.com/ https://bracket-based-decision-making.firebaseapp.com/
___alt 8y ago
That would be neat, browsing through several dozen fonts to find the right pick is a bit overwhelming, although one can argue it's a self-imposed burden.

0xBA5ED 8y ago

I like the 'M+' fonts for C++ code. Nice and compact to allow more characters to fit comfortably on a line.

huy-nguyen 8y ago

I’ll put in a mention for Dank Mono. I’ve been using it for a year and love it (https://dank.sh https://dank.sh). It’s like Operator Mono but much cheaper.

pixard 8y ago
I own both and actually prefer Dank Mono. The lowercase f is just so nice.
jgalentine007 8y ago
This is what I've been using the last year as well. At first I felt silly paying for a font but I really like it - having cursive fonts in VsCode does seem to help with my comprehension and breaks up the monotony a bit.

vackosar 8y ago

OCR-A font was made to be recognizable by 60s OCR tech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A

ignaloidas 8y ago
It's machine first, so human readability falls. Though there's the benefit that you will newer wonder what the letter is at all as they are so distinct.

heyjudy 8y ago

I've tried dozens. Monaco or Source Code Pro You also have to try them in your terminal or editor, because on the web isn't the same experience.

Jaruzel 8y ago
Browsers tend to use their own inbuilt font rendering code, which can be different from the OS. I know for a fact that some of the fonts shown at app.programmingfonts.org do not render that well inside apps on Windows 10.

daxterspeed 8y ago

I think a lot of these fonts deserve a little blurb about their history and purpose. For example Liberation Mono (version 2+) and Cousine are fundamentally the same font available under the same SIL Open Font License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts#Distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts#Distribution Personally I use and recommend Liberation Mono / Cousine at 9pt / 12px. I've been using this font for years so it's just ended up what I'm the most comfortable with for both reading and writing.

klageveen 8y ago
That's a good point. I usually have a little blurb like that on the blog, but I have been trying to integrate more info about each font into the test drive thing. There are lot's of "family relations" like that between fonts.

rcarmo 8y ago

I pretty much standardized on Fira Code over the past few years, although the ligatures seem to delay rendering a bit. But overall I like that lowercase letters have nice, readable descenders and hints on HIDPI displays, and that my editor now looks exactly the same on Windows and Mac.

Topolomancer 8y ago

This is interesting, but I would like a more 'guided' tour, maybe backed up by some usage data, as well as some statistics about readability and so on.

Stratoscope 8y ago
Now that is an interesting perspective! It's hard for me to imagine that I would choose a font based on usage data and statistics: "25% more coders use Inconsolata than Verdana, and they suffer 3% less eyestrain as a result." How would you even measure such a thing? A font that works well on a low-DPI display may not be the same one that looks great on a high-DPI display. And one person's eyes are not my eyes. I look at a font, try using it in my work, and either I like or I don't like it. Even if I do like it, I will probably find some flaws in it and fix them in a font editor. Or maybe I don't and just live with it. I always enjoy comparing notes with people about what fonts we like to use. But this seems like personal preference, not science.

shmerl 8y ago

I've been using DejaVu Sans Mono for quite some time. It's a nice font. It used to be the default monospace font in KDE, until they switched to Noto Mono. Autohinting setting for fontconfig makes it look better for me:  <match target="font"> <test name="family"> <string>DejaVu Sans Mono</string> </test> <edit name="autohint" mode="assign"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> </match>

simias 8y ago
I'm in the same boat, every time one of these threads pop up I try a few different fonts recommended here but I always end up going back to DejaVu. It think it looks pretty good, it has good Unicode coverage, it's supported out of the box on most distros... It's weird because I can be pretty snobbish and opinionated with a lot of programming-related stuff (I use a very expensive keyboard, a large 4k screen, a heavily customized editor and window manager etc...) but when it comes to fonts I really have a hard time finding a real improvement with some of the very expensive fonts people are recommending in this thread compared to good old DevaVu. I would be very interested to read an article that would explain in details what makes certain fonts better or worse than others, especially for programming.
- platz 8y ago
  I switched from using devavu for years finally to iosevka
  - shittyadmin 8y ago
    Had a look at iosevka - it definitely seems nicer than many of the others, but it still feels too vertical when compared to DejaVu in my opinion. Is there something that sold you on it?
    - platz 8y ago
      Well, it certainly is more vertical. The increased x-height allows it to be readable at small sizes (and fit more horizontally) which looks great in the terminal and editor, but maybe a bit odd on the test page.

tigen 8y ago

The Terminus font doesn't seem to render properly there. Possibly it's just my browser but I use that font all the time in the terminal. Here it looks glitchy/aliased or something.

drey08 8y ago
It's one of the reasons why I still haven't fully switched to VSCode. There doesn't seem to be a way to disable antialiasing in VSCode to make this font look good, as far as I can tell.
- klageveen 8y ago
  You can uncheck the AA option on programmingfonts.org though. I need to make something to make fonts render at their “proper” size when needed...

Hackbraten 8y ago

Slightly OT: Iosevka Term Light is my favorite font for the terminal. It looks pretty on a HiDPI screen. Also, it’s the only font that wouldn’t break box-drawing Unicode glyphs for me, e. g. those used by the tree command.

tomoya 8y ago

Recommend a mixed font in Chinese environment YaHei Consolas Hybrid

make3 8y ago

Dude where is the Python support, the fastest growing language after Javascript, and much bigger than some of the other included languages

klageveen 8y ago
It's just a default set from some release of CodeMirror. I guess I should upgrade that..

miguelmota 8y ago

This is awesome. Note to site owner; I'm getting "Mixed Content" warnings because some scripts are served over HTTP instead of HTTPS.

klageveen 8y ago
Thanks! It's on my list to actually get https set up for it because originally GitHub pages didn't support that.

mesaframe 8y ago

Is there any theme like ambiance theme available on Visual Studio Code? https://screenshots.firefox.com/9wlM0C9RCyou4Rk9/app.programmingfonts.org https://screenshots.firefox.com/9wlM0C9RCyou4Rk9/app.program...

jve 8y ago

Argh, why hijack my browser back button and history? :/ Otherwise, thanks for nice list to quickly compare those fonts :)

tharwan 8y ago

I think Mensch is missing: https://robey.lag.net/2010/06/21/mensch-font.html https://robey.lag.net/2010/06/21/mensch-font.html

klageveen 8y ago
I think it too!

enriquto 8y ago

for bitmap fonts it should disable the resize option (or at least quantize it to the sizes where it makes sense)

martijn_himself 8y ago

I don't own a Mac at the minute but I must say Monaco is hands down the best programming font I've worked with. Most of the fonts on this list don't even come close.

lispm 8y ago
Apple long ago chose 'Menlo' and it now uses in some applications (Xcode, Terminal) the font 'SF Mono'.

mkesper 8y ago

Right now there is another font designed for legibility on HN frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18946601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18946601

rawfael 8y ago

This is very nice. I'd like to see the Solarized color scheme and Apple's SF Mono.

rbanffy 8y ago

I love the way Consola Mono and Nova Mono remind me of Smalltalk's Cream font. <3

rbanffy 8y ago

I like the way Go Mono fixes Luxi Mono's "0", but I like Luxi's "g" better.

dspillett 8y ago

A handy list and preview. It might be nice to include some detail as to the features provided by some of the fonts on the font list, if it can be done without making the UI too busy. I'm thinking indicators for things like: true italic provided (instead of leaving the OS to use false italics), true bold provided, programming ligatures (as seen in those like Fira Code), ... Perhaps filters too.

toyg 8y ago
Ligatures could probably be simply shown by adding one or two of the most common ones ( <=, != etc...)
- gjm11 8y ago
  Maybe it's changed in the last hour or two, but for me it does indicate when ligatures are present -- in the list on the lest, under the name of each font there's a line giving name, date, and some features -- one of which is "ligatures".
  - dspillett 8y ago
    So there is. Not sure if I missed that earlier or if ligatures have been added since. I remember seeing sans/serif/bitmap there but not ligatures.
  - klageveen 8y ago
    Fonts with ligatures are indicated as such, but I’ve yet to add all the other metadata. I do have the data, just need ideas on how to surface it in the UI with too much clutter. I also have to add search, keyboard navigation, etc. I’ll probably have things to do here well beyond retirement ;)

TomasSedovic 8y ago

This is a really cool site, thanks! It also helped me understand something about the font sizes that always puzzled me (but never enough to actually look it up). All of the fonts there have the size of 16, but some are clearly bigger than others. Compare e.g. Inconsolata and Meslo: http://app.programmingfonts.org/#inconsolata http://app.programmingfonts.org/#inconsolata http://app.programmingfonts.org/#meslo http://app.programmingfonts.org/#meslo Having them side by side, you can see that they contain the same vertical amount of space. Inconsolata's glyphs are smaller, but they're still in the box of the same height. It does seem that the "font size" only refers to the height, though. The width is clearly variable. To anyone who actually understands this properly: is the above correct or is that just an artefact of how the website renders the text?

Kaibeezy 8y ago
What you’re noticing is the variation in “x-height”, that is, the height of the middle part of the lowercase letterforms, not counting ascenders/descenders. Width can always vary. Combinations of greater width and x-height make the letters look bigger. At least, that’s the way I’ve always understood it. This image shows it clearly: http://kapundahigh.weebly.com/uploads/6/1/5/4/61545621/xheight_1_orig.gif http://kapundahigh.weebly.com/uploads/6/1/5/4/61545621/xheig...
klageveen 8y ago
A font’s dimensions at a given “font-size” are actually completely up to the designer. Something like x-height can only be determined by rendering and then measuring. Editors tend to be full of character measuring code. x-height also doesn’t say anything about the length of descenders and ascenders. Some fonts are exactly the same size though, there a bunch of variations of Courier to be used as a replacement (for licensing reasons). If they’re not designed to the same dimensions you cannot be sure text will fit on the page with the other font. And if they’re the same size they can still look larger or smaller by a wide margin. It’s a wonderful world :)

h1d 8y ago

Kudos for including BPmono. I have been using it as my favorite programming font for 10 years which somehow gets no attention when people talk about their favorite fonts. I've tried many of the more famous ones but the clarity is simply good.

fastflo 8y ago

good old misc fixed is missing? https://pasteboard.co/HXsWkSo.png https://pasteboard.co/HXsWkSo.png

interlocutor 8y ago

No one has mentioned Lucida Sans Typewriter. It was the default console font on Solaris, and it was may favorite code font for more than a decade. I even made a Windows version of that font, for my own use, using a bitmapped font editor. Here's a screenshot of Solaris showing that font: http://agilo.acjs.net/files/screenshot_solaris.png http://agilo.acjs.net/files/screenshot_solaris.png You can buy it from Adobe: https://www.fonts.com/font/adobe/lucida-sans-typewriter/regular https://www.fonts.com/font/adobe/lucida-sans-typewriter/regu...

idoubtit 8y ago
My first test on a monotype font targets similar characters, especially at small sizes: 0O 1l ~- }) … There is no tilde in Lucida's snapshot, but I would rate the font very low on the readability of the other characters. The other parameters (serif, form of the "g", etc) are of no importance to me if the first test fails.
signal11 8y ago
Ah, I mentioned it a little while ago in another comment thread. Microsoft bundled it with older versions of Office and Windows, and is included in their TrueType Font Pack[1] [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/lucida-sans-typewriter https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/lucida...
- dumol 8y ago
  Also in the JRE downloads at https://www.java.com/download/ https://www.java.com/download/ in the lib/fonts sub-dir since forever.

mjaniczek 8y ago

target="_blank" would certainly help usability of the "Info & Download" links. Thanks for the website, klageveen!

klageveen 8y ago
Don’t get me started on target=“_blank” and UX ;)

alex_hitchins 8y ago

This is a great resource, but doesn't come up with anything that beats Monaco for me. Does anyone have any known good reference sites for going about creating your own font? I've thought about this a lot yet never had the time to do. I think creating my own would be incredibly cool!

hnarn 8y ago

It drives me crazy when fonts look at the old convention of "strike through zero" and for some reason decides they need to be different from the convention and allow the strike to pass the edges of the zero circle. "Anka/Coder" in the linked article is guilty of this. When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero, it's a Danish or Norwegian "Ö" (Ø). It's been a part of their alphabet for centuries. The whole purpose of the "strike through zero" is to stop it from being mixed up with Omega. By badly thought out design and a need to be different for no reason, you just returned to square one, because the font is now unreadable for anyone that knows or works with the letter Ø.

andai 8y ago
∅
uasm 8y ago
> "When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero, it's a Danish or Norwegian "Ö" (Ø). It's been a part of their alphabet for centuries." You can't please all the people, all of the time. There are ~21 million people living in Scandinavia - and for them, that could indeed be somewhat of an issue. What about the rest of the planet? > "By badly thought out design and a need to be different for no reason, you just returned to square one, because the font is now unreadable for anyone that knows or works with the letter Ø." Out of curiosity, what would you consider to be a better design?
- detaro 8y ago
  > What would you consider to be a better design then? > > "When the strike passes the edge of the circle, it's no longer a zero,
  - hinkley 8y ago
    Well, at least he wasn't belligerent. Noticing a lot of threads like that on Reddit lately. Hope it doesn't spread.
- 8y ago

jimijazz 8y ago

Is it me or Bitstream Vera Sans Mono looks exactly the same as DejaVu Mono ?

uwu 8y ago
from wikipedia: > The DejaVu fonts are modifications of the Bitstream Vera fonts designed for greater coverage of Unicode, as well as providing more styles.

ricanontherun 8y ago

Surprised by how bad these fonts look with languages other than JS.

coldcode 8y ago

Is there some way to view them in light mode? I am not a fan of the dark.

kamek 8y ago
You can select the colour scheme from a menu in the bottom left (including several light schemes).
ChrisGranger 8y ago
Under the font size selector, there's a theme selector.
kps 8y ago
Is there a color scheme that doesn't look like a tornado hit a paint factory? I couldn't find one.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

moolc 8y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhMRAjX95k0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhMRAjX95k0 is the way that helped me selecting new monospaced font

no_wizard 8y ago

Seems worth plugging nerd fonts if someone has not done so already. It’s a great place to get patched fonts like this (most of them support ligatures for Instance and are based on a lot of these fonts) https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/blob/master/readme.md https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/blob/master/readme.m...

hivacruz 8y ago

Works terrible for me with Safari or Chrome. Can't start with <?php, can't copy/paste some code.

jswizzy 8y ago

I wish there was a filter. It would be nice to filter out fonts that are not mono typed and don't have ligatures.

klageveen 8y ago
They’re all mono though ;)

blunte 8y ago

Great site, but one request: Please make the up/down keyboard arrows switch to the prev/next font (rather than just scrolling the list of fonts). That way I could keep my eyes on the code window to really feel the change. Currently, having to visually bounce from code window to font selection window and back slows me down and makes it harder for me to compare fonts.

kps 8y ago
Tab, Tab, Return.
neurotrace 8y ago
I just whipped this userscript together that you might like. J/K for next/previous font A/Z to increase/decrease font size S/X to increase/decrease spacing T to toggle anti-aliasing https://gist.github.com/MCluck90/1cbcbb615eca18466b8be6c7ec003df0 https://gist.github.com/MCluck90/1cbcbb615eca18466b8be6c7ec0...
jay_kyburz 8y ago
I think it would also be good to mark them as you look down the list, then filter the list and work down it again, marking more until you are left with just one.
- tripzilch 8y ago
  Yes, something this would be very useful for actually comparing the fonts. Google Web Fonts has something similar, you can select a bunch of fonts from the long list, that you like from first glances, and then compare only that selection with sample texts. For this list of programming fonts, I could first select (mark) a bunch that just match my general taste (shape, weight, x-height). Then I would be able to easily switch between my selection/shortlist to inspect more detailed differences such as how numbers are aligned with respect to brackets and operators, or whatever. Currently it's a bit hard to do if you have to keep a mental shortlist of fonts you like enough for further inspection, to remember which ones to check back on (especially if you see some names for the first time). Regardless, it's a really cool site, great resource, and already the comparing mechanism is pretty nice!

Dowwie 8y ago

I'm so adjusted to Iosevka that anything else looks really weird to me..

opk 8y ago

It'd be good to have details of unicode coverage on this site, i.e how many glyphs in various major blocks are covered (e.g greek, cyrillic, box drawing, mathematical symbols etc).

klageveen 8y ago
The problem here is that the information isn’t always available. If the docs don’t mention box drawing characters, or powerline symbols the font may still have them. Also, a lot of sources mention the number of glyphs but not the Unicode ranges that are covered.

mshenfield 8y ago

I loved traipsing through the different fonts to see what they did. I discovered some font-features I wasn't aware of: * bitmapped + ligatured fonts - you can have both! * sans-serif normal, serif italics - Italicized words were serif-ed. "Latin Modern Mono" is an example. Also, Donald Knuth made that font - did you know Donald Knuth made a font? Really cool work, thanks for making this.

klageveen 8y ago
Awesome feedback, thanks!

mmgutz 8y ago

For those who want to quickly compare two fonts, simply click on the desired fonts and click forward and back button on your browser.

pmarreck 8y ago

Fira Code with ligature support turned on in your editor, or GTFO. LOVE. IT. https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

mortenjorck 8y ago

Something not in the list that would make a good addition is iA’s (makers of the popular iA Writer app) fork of IBM Plex Mono. They took Plex and redesigned some of the more quirky, IBM-brand glyphs such as loosening the tight radii on the descenders of ’t’ and ‘j’, and built some fairly novel duospace and quad-space versions: https://ia.net/writer/blog/a-typographic-christmas https://ia.net/writer/blog/a-typographic-christmas The GitHub link is somewhat buried in the post: https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts

thesimp 8y ago

I use a very simple test to verify if fonts are usable in programmer/technical environments: - check the readability of lower and upper case "i" (india) against the number "1" (one)and the lower and upper case "l" (lima). - Check the readability of the lower and upper case "o" (oscar) against the number "0". - check if the font can be used monospaced with being reasonable to good readability. If it passes those checks then it is often good enough for me.

Syzygies 8y ago
- how much code can one fit on a screen, still maximum legibiilty? - Is there a lighter weight variant from which one can steal ()[]{} ? Essential for Lisp programming, nice for every language. My current winner is Roboto Mono Regular, with brackets borrowed from Roboto Mono Light. The font disappears on me (attitude takes bandwidth) and one would never know I played with the brackets till one goes back to another font, and it becomes obvious brackets on a Retina display have no business having the same weight as body text. Sample ('Zoom Out' for realistic scale): https://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/etc/RobotoLisp.png https://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/etc/RobotoLisp.png
- O_H_E 8y ago
  Interesting. It really look nicer
- mthoms 8y ago
  Very interesting. I've never heard of this idea of making some specific glyphs thinner, but it makes perfect sense. I'm curious, is this something you discovered on your own? I'm definitely going to try this out.

coleifer 8y ago

I put together a list of my own, including screenshots with a small code snippet. Might be helpful as this list does include some that are not listed on programmingfonts.org: http://charlesleifer.com/blog/monospace-font-favorites/ http://charlesleifer.com/blog/monospace-font-favorites/

tomc1985 8y ago

Default size 16, spacing 1.4? Good lord that is way too big... (props for remembering set values between reloads though)

vzaliva 8y ago

It would be nice to see some Unicode things in the example, like arrows, various math symbols, etc. I am looking for a good programming font with the support of math symbols.

nielsbot 8y ago

Cool! But I would love to have Input Sans included... (Not just Input Mono).

boterock 8y ago

I recently found a font named "NSimSun" when customizing the windows console, and I am currently using it for programming. It looks like a serif font but it has finer details like a non-monospace font. I think it is because it was made for asian text, and each latin character does half the width of an eastern character. Here is the docs for the font: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/simsun#simsun-extb https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/simsun... It feels unsupported overall, but I set it up in the terminal and text editors and I am happy with it, It looks like a proper font, and not a dumbed-down-to-align-to-pixels font.Also there are some missing glyphs like áéíóú, but maybe if more people use it, MS will improve the font =)

Soroush 8y ago

Excellent website! May I suggest: 1. Show an indicator which font is currently selected. 2. Allow users to save their favorites, so they can find what they like faster next time they visit. Thanks for sharing it, it's very useful :)