4 ms·
The Best Programming Fonts
- yan 17y agoIt's not mentioned, but I love Pragmata[1]. It's expensive, but gorgeous and very usable. And I stand by what I said about it earlier: http://twitter.com/yan_i/status/1442859670 http://twitter.com/yan_i/status/1442859670 [1] http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragma.htm http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragma.htm
- weaksauce 17y agoWow. 90 euro for a font is pricey. It looks nice. What makes it better than the other programming fonts? or is it a general feeling when you use it?
- pavelludiq 17y agoI used to like Monaco, but its parentheses are kind of annoying if you program in a lisp like language, or if you need to nest a lot of parentheses. Now im using dejavu sans mono.
- _giu 17y agomy favorite programming font (and I think it is a pity that the article doesn't mention it): Envy Code R (http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-coding-font-released http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-cod...) I just love this font! it's such a beautiful piece of font-design and I only can recommend you to try it out!
- badger7 17y agoGrunties's comment FTW. "monospace good, non-monospace bad, all other considerations irrelevant. Next?"
- _giu 17y agothat's the same thought I had when I saw that Arial was the first item on their list. I once tried to use a non-monospaced font, but that lasted only a few seconds. it just doesn't fit!
- utx00 17y agoinconsolata droid-sans mono
- dimitar 17y agoHow about the X11 "fixed" font and my favorite - "terminus"? Fixed, by the way is the font you see when you start xterm in most environments. Hold Ctrl and the RMB while the mouse cursor is in a xterm window and you can see it in different sizes
- riobard 17y agoI guess platform/rendering engine difference should be taken into consideration when choosing the "best" fonts. Same font is usually rendered very differently on different platforms with anti-aliasing on. For example, Monaco looks fantastic on Mac, but just so-so on Windows/Linux. (Though for bitmap fonts this seems not a real issue.)
- socratees 17y agoArial? I've tried using non monospace fonts for code. They've never worked out for me.
- jrockway 17y agoI think it might be dependent on what language you use. In Perl, alignment is very important, as you have a lot of code that looks like: my $foo = Foo->new( named_initargs => 'go here', and_also => 'here', ); (There are various technical reasons to avoid this style, but I think it looks too nice to avoid.) As a result, a non-monospaced font would be a nightmare. However, perhaps if you are using a language where everything is positional (Java, C), then maybe it doesn't matter: Foo foo = new Foo(args, go, here, and, if, you, run, out, of, room, perhaps, they, can, be, written, like, this); Note that the only alignment is the initial indentation; one space is always as wide as another space, so a variable-width font won't mess anything up. Obviously if you are using Haskell or Python, you will care even more about alignment, and hence will want a monospaced font. You will also want a monospaced font in your terminal emulator, as most console apps depend on all glyphs being equally wide.
- jemmons 17y agoNumber one is Arial? Way to blow all credibility right up front.
- blogimus 17y agoThe fonts are listed in alphabetical order. But still, as stated in the article: "It can be a little difficult to distinguish between uppercase i / lowercase L and nested single/double quotes but that can be said of many proportional fonts." For source code editing, I'll stick to a monospaced font myself.
- viggity 17y agoAgreed. If a new person starts working with me and they are not using a fixed width font, I immediately question their sanity and their skills.
- jrockway 17y agoDon't use Vera, use DejaVu. It's the same font, but with many more Unicode characters. (λ looks much nicer after I made the switch.) Link: http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
- bitwize 17y agoTerminus. LispM font. Smoothed blended TrueType programming fonts are for clove-cigarette-smoking nancy boys.
- wastedbrains 17y agoI am a big fan of Anonymous, it is currently my emacs code font. http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymous.html http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymous.html
- puns 17y ago+1 for Anonymous. It's a great font to use on OS X, especially if you're using light font on a dark background, as OS X tends to render the fonts much heavier and blurrier with antialiasing. Anonymous remains fairly crisp.
- neovive 17y ago++ for Dina. It's an excellent programming font and looks great even at 8pt. It allows you to see much more code per screen.
- nimbix 17y agoI'm perfectly happy with Courier New. Most editors on windows use it by default and I never felt the need to change it.
- blackman 17y agoI like triskweline http://www.netalive.org/tinkering/triskweline/ http://www.netalive.org/tinkering/triskweline/
- Zev 17y agoEspresso Mono gets my vote nowadays. Prior to that, I was using Consolas for the prior year or so. I think I used Monaco or Inconsolata before that. Can't really remember.
- Semiapies 17y agoI've been happily using Proggy Clean for a while. It's even surprisingly readable printed at low point size.
- windsurfer 17y agoProggy is nice if your screen is 640x480 and CRT, but I think LCD screens and font smoothing has made that font irrelevant.
- Semiapies 17y agoMm, works nicely for me at 1280 x 1024 a monitor. Also quite reasonable-looking printed.