12 ms·
The Best Programming Font: M+
- bithush 12y agoA little too thin for my tastes. I quite like Consolas or good old Courier New. To me the font width isn't all that important compared to the font height as I am not pressed for width but an extra couple of lines visible vertically is almost always wanted. Consolas is a nice balance at 11pt.
- facorreia 12y agoIt's more condensed horizontally, but has a greater line height. As a result, I can see less lines at a time with this font.
- pbreit 12y agoIn many/most editors you can adjust line height (although in TextMate it is surprisingly hard to perform such a thing).
- norswap 12y agoHow does it compare to Monaco?
- omellet 12y agoFalse. The best programming font is Consolas.
- facorreia 12y agoI just tried Consolas again, inspired by this article[1]. I like how it is short and shows a lot of vertical lines. And it looks good. But after comparing it side-by-side with Monospace (default on Linux Mint), I'm sticking with it. I just like more how it looks, it seems clearer to my eyes.[2] [1] http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts [2] http://i.imgur.com/1FRVhWh.png http://i.imgur.com/1FRVhWh.png
- TylerE 12y agoYou probably need to do the illegal-in-the-US cleartype font patches to get non-half-assed linux font rendering.
- facorreia 12y agoI believe you're right. I could do that, since I don't live in the US. :) Consolas was designed for ClearType, and for Windows. And I remember liking it very much on Visual Studio. But I'll just leave it be, I'm happy for now as it is.
- farresito 12y agoI think it's completely legal by now, since the patents expired a couple of years ago (or something like that).
- a_e_k 12y agoAs I understand it, the patents on bytecode hinting have expired. I wouldn't be surprised if subpixel antialiasing was still patented.
- Marazan 12y agoDouble false, monofur is the champion of programming fonts. Monofur is also known as "Oh my god that's horrible why are you using that?" by my heathen work colleagues.
- awalton 12y agoHonestly, Inconsolata is the better Consolas. But I've gotten so used to the Deja Vu family of fonts being the default monospace font everywhere on Linux that I don't know if I could go back to using it again.
- omellet 12y agoI use Inconsolata if I can't use Consolas, they're nearly the same.
- smacktoward 12y agoIs there a legal/practical way to use Consolas on any OS other than Windows? The last time I looked into using it on my Ubuntu workstation (which was admittedly a couple of years ago), it involved manually extracting the font files from the installer for MS's standalone PowerPoint viewer application, which was both clumsy and probably against the viewer application's license.
- KhalPanda 12y ago> "The best monospace font for programmers is M+." Seems there's a bit of a grammar issue here, I've fixed it for you: "My favourite monospace font for programming is M+."
- ramblerman 12y agoIt's considered good writing style to write the first sentence, the second is implied. Unless you're presenting historical facts or figures, If every sentence in an article had the author qualify himself with 'imo', 'that's why I think that', etc... it would be a pain to read, and the argument would be a lot weaker.
- nfoz 12y agoI don't know, I strongly prefer the explicit "IMO" where correct. Most people do mix up, in their writing, statements of opinion and statements of fact. It's really annoying to leave the burden on the reader to figure out which is meant.
- voxic11 12y agoI don't know, I strongly prefer the explicit "IMO" where correct. IMO most people do mix up, in their writing, statements of opinion and statements of fact. IMO it's really annoying to leave the burden on the reader to figure out which is meant.
- rubicon33 12y agowell played
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- CapitalistCartr 12y agoThe argument would be weaker because it is weak in reality. That is why journalism digs up actual evidence beyond one person's speculation. This article is light on substance; if he'd written it as a personal opinion, it still would have stood to introduce the font. Having said that, the font looks promising, and I'll try it out.
- jggonz 12y agoI personally prefer to use Times New Roman.
- awalton 12y agoUsing a serif font face for programming? You are a brave man.
- monkeyprojects 12y agoSurely its comic sans. It adds that certain something to most pieces of code...
- Squarex 12y agoFantasque Sans Mono, font inspired by Comic Sans, is actually pretty cool. https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans
- guidopallemans 12y agoin the same line: monofur http://www.dafont.com/monofur.font http://www.dafont.com/monofur.font
- bloke_zero 12y agoI've been using this for a while and it's just nice to use - easy on the eye some how.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- andrewchoi 12y agoIs this a new kind of holy war? First we warred on what platform to run, then what we run on the platform, and finally how we display what we run on these platforms?
- drhayes9 12y agoCaveat: "Infinite are the arguments of mages." My current favorite programming font is Inconsolata, but I'm being swayed by Source Code Pro.
- superpluto 12y agoYall trippin. The best font for programming is Anonymous Pro.
- mykhal 12y agoi think that Terminus is yet bester
- unwind 12y agoThe compressed archive containing this font is 37,6 MB. This makes me feel very old. Of course there are more than 40 individual TTF files in the archive, but still: almost 40 MB! Yikes.
- skywhopper 12y agoI can see the value in a legible monospace font that's compressed horizontally. That said, I'm pretty happy with Inconsolata these days.
- mavick 12y agoUbuntu Mono for me.
- poolpool 12y agoOne of the best designed and most complete programming fonts is PragmataPro. http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragmatapro.htm http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragmatapro.htm
- ChikkaChiChi 12y agoThe 0 should always be slightly more oblong than the character O, even if you are using a slashing it. Other than that, this is a decent retina font, but so are Anonymous Pro, Inconsolata-dz, Consolas, and Source Code Pro; and those all also come with options for Powerline.
- Zardoz84 12y agoNot forget Hermit font
- swah 12y agoI thought every font looked good on retina displays, since my problem is always to find fonts that are well hinted and look sharp in small sizes.
- cliftonk 12y agoI have spent a significant amount of time with many programming fonts. My favorite monospaced font is Menlo. That said, I'm farsighted and prefer fonts with more weight.
- mtford 12y agoI'm a huge inconsolata fan myself.
- codeitup 12y agoAlso a strong Inconsolata fan, it's one of the first things I change on a new editor.
- grmarcil 12y agoI just compared Inconsolata and Consolas side by side and couldn't believe how similar they actually are. Whenever I just swap between the two, it's hard to compare, since Consolas seems to run about a point bigger looking than Inconsolata, so I have to scale it back a bit to give a real comparison. Not surprising considering the author of Inconsolata cites Consolas as his primary inspiration, but I'd never noticed exactly how close they are. Both great monospace fonts. Very nice characters, but what really makes them stand out to me is that they both manage their kerning very well, especially around thin characters. Many other monospace fonts, including M+, end up with awkward gaps that approach a full space width and give the text a slinky-like compression/decompression effect, making reading and determining word breaks at a glance difficult.
- thathonkey 12y agoFonts are quite the subjective thing. M+ looks a little on the thin side to me. I greatly prefer Menlo (regular, which happens to be the default for Sublime Text on OS X) or Consolas.
- gr3yh47 12y agoto thin, to tall, and most importantly the x height is much too high so CamelCase is less obvious
- kps 12y agoM+ thin is too thin, and M+ regular too bold, for my taste. And though I do like leading, M+ has too much built in; it's easy for a user to add, but difficult to remove. Currently I use Fantasque.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y agoI'm not sure that font choices are entirely subjective. Legibility matters, and it's not impossible that better legibility means fewer bugs and less eye/brain strain. It would be cool if there was objective research into this. (I don't know of any, but I haven't tried searching very hard.) I can't look at M+ without seeing M+. With other fonts - I'm old-fashioned and like Menlo, but I've tried many others - all I see is code.
- thathonkey 12y agoOf course they aren't entirely subjective! There are objective ways that fonts can be assessed for sure. In fact, there's an entire documentary on Netflix about Helvetica (and titled the same).
- bulte-rs 12y agoI actually quite like Unifont for coding :S
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Touche 12y agoI'm a professional programmer. I know quite a bit about computers. I don't claim to be the smartest guy in the room but I'm no dummy. And I have no idea how to install a font. I download the zip and open it and there are 43 (43!) ttf files. I can install them by double clicking the file and selecting Install Font. But then what? I now have 43 new fonts, but how do I know which one to use in my editor? Can someone explain this for a dummy?
- ww520 12y agoWhat editor are you using? In Emacs, put this in the .emacs file to set up the default font at startup. (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Source Code Pro" :height 110)
- Touche 12y agoI use Vim, but my question is which of the 43 fonts do I want to use?
- BSousa 12y agoYou will probably have to set the terminal font and not Vim's. In any case, usually when there are various ttf files for a single font, they all belong to a Font and then have variations (Medium, Medium Italic, Condensed, etc) Depending on the software, it maybe presented with 43 different fonts, or one single font, with variations (On mac, if you open Font Book, you get the font name, then you can expand to the variation, don't remember how it works on Windows)
- Touche 12y agoSo which variation do I want? I use MacVim which gives me a font selector that you select the variation.
- estevez 12y agoFor gVim I put this in my .vimrc: set guifont=Source\ Code\ Pro\ for\ Powerline\ Medium\ 11
- ajarmst 12y agoHmmmm. When teaching basic physics, I sometimes have trouble illustrating the difference between energy and work for my students. But this solves it! Post something with a title of "The best x for programmers is y", and you can watch the expenditure of an enormous amount of energy - yet, zero work.
- pbreit 12y agoIt's surprising to me with the advent of retina screens that there are so few narrow options (M+ is the only one I've seen). Aesthetics aside (although M+ is quite pleasing to the eye), I think the narrowness functionally =is= better. However the line height is quite tall which I'm not sure is an attribute of the font or text editors. TextMate still inexplicably has terrible line height management (you have to mess around with 2 terminal command settings).
- adamors 12y agoI've yet to find a font that I like more than DejaVu Sans Mono. It strikes the perfect balance between being monospaced and looking good IMO. Plus it's open source easily installable everywhere. I've tried almost every other "programmer" font but there's always something that rubs me the wrong way. In the case of M+, it just looks thin and silly.
- pera 12y agoYeah, DejaVu Sans Mono is perfect, though sometimes I also use the new Source Code Pro and the old ProggyCleanTT (like when I'm working for several hours and my eyes need something more sharp).
- lobster_johnson 12y agoSame here. DejaVu is very clear and legible.
- tormeh 12y agoI looked it up in gedit, and it turns out Dejavu sans mono and Ubuntu mono are practically identical. Really minute details. I prefer Ubuntu because it's less fuzzy on my non-retina screen, though. For fun, try Tex Gyre Chorus Medium and show it to a programmer and say it's your favorite programming font.
- Demiurge 12y agoI tried it, and actually don't like the narrowness. It's less readable to me. Also, the light version isn't nearly as sharp as Source Code Pro Light. I think I will be sticking to Adobes font as my favorite...
- cmpaul 12y agoMaybe it's because I'm getting older, but no programming font comes close to Monaco in terms of clarity and character balance and spacing (vertically and horizontally). Ultimately it comes down to being able to patterns quickly in the code. You can train yourself to do this with any font.
- ww520 12y agoI've tried different programming fonts, and finally settled on the old Source Code Pro font. I don't like overly narrow font. It's just a personal preference. There's no "best" in subjective personal taste.
- izzydata 12y ago"Retina Displays" So I guess it looks bad on high resolution screens that aren't on apple devices? Why do people even use this term when not referencing magical apple lingo?
- sp332 12y agoBecause it has better branding, and fewer syllables? You didn't have any trouble understanding what was meant, and I'd guess no one else reading the article did either.
- matthuggins 12y agoAs a developer, this font looks like it would be terrible for trying to scan code. Way too thin for my taste.
- ashmud 12y agoFor tiny text, my preference is ProFont. http://tobiasjung.name/profont/ http://tobiasjung.name/profont/
- uptownJimmy 12y agoYou seem confused.
- leishulang 12y agoOnly M+ 1m, 1mn, 2m have those features author mentioned.
- platz 12y agoBitstream Vera Sans Mono occupies a nice middle-ground on Linux for programming, almost like Monaco but a little clearer, if more boring. Have preferred compared to others so far. I couldn't get Monaco, a little more eccentric but sometimes nicer to look at, to render correctly on Linux. Wierd line heights and hinting problems.
- smacktoward 12y agoOh good, a "the best programming font is [INSERT COMPLETELY SUBJECTIVE PERSONAL OPINION HERE]" article. Next up: what's the best text editor? You all start the discussion while I go pop some popcorn.
- donniezazen 12y agomplus-fonts-common.noarch : Mplus, common files (documentation…) mplus-1c-fonts.noarch : M+ C is optimized to be proportioned and has two variations mplus-1m-fonts.noarch : M+ M emphasize the balance of natural letterform and high legibility mplus-1mn-fonts.noarch : M+ M emphasize the balance of natural letterform and high legibility mplus-1p-fonts.noarch : M+ P is aimed as sophisticated and relaxed design mplus-2c-fonts.noarch : M+ C is optimized to be proportioned and has two variations mplus-2m-fonts.noarch : M+ M emphasize the balance of natural letterform and high legibility mplus-2p-fonts.noarch : M+ P is aimed as sophisticated and relaxed design Looks like Fedora users have a lot of choice. Which of these is the author talking about?
- mgmeyers 12y agoM+ M are the monospaced fonts
- donniezazen 12y agomplus-1m-fonts.noarch : M+ M emphasize the balance of natural letterform and high legibility mplus-1mn-fonts.noarch : M+ M emphasize the balance of natural letterform and high legibility Apologies, I am not sure which one of these you are talking about.
- jefurii 12y agoPersonally I prefer to code on an array of Nixie tubes.
- ChikkaChiChi 12y agoIn defense of the design of this project, tall and thin is in. Oregon Speed Limit signs now use a taller and thinner font that is much easier to read at distance. Also the NHL used new fonts to number their jerseys for the Stadium Series so that the fonts could be seen at greater distances. http://www.markyville.com/aaroads/SpeedLimit-OR.png http://www.markyville.com/aaroads/SpeedLimit-OR.png http://icethetics.squarespace.com/storage/blog13/1213-pit14ss-back.png?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1387001395641 http://icethetics.squarespace.com/storage/blog13/1213-pit14s... PS: Go Pens.
- h1d 12y agoEverytime I come across these programming font articles, no one seem to mention about BPMono, which I've been using for years exclusively and loving it. http://backpacker.gr/font.asp?m=1&font=bp2 http://backpacker.gr/font.asp?m=1&font=bp2
- ramgorur 12y agofont looks neat, but I think it's a bit taller than luculent (http://eastfarthing.com/luculent/ http://eastfarthing.com/luculent/). I like luculent.